How to build this blog 11: The Scourge of Spambot jacob73kolp

I was pleased to find a new user called ‘jacob73kolp’ had registered on my blog this morning. Oddly this user had made no comments.

Just before composing the welcome email I decided to google the name to see if this character appeared anywhere else and the results were page after page of user profiles. In amongst it all I saw the word ’spambot’ (Thanks to The Lair of The Cubelodyte and FlowerPoop).

So what is a spambot? Well, there are several types according to the wikipedia but we are dealing with a Forum spambot here.

Forum spambots surf the web, looking for guestbooks, wikis, blogs, forums and any other web forms to submit spam links to the web forms it finds. Read more of this article at Wikipedia

The article goes on to say

The easiest way to prevent spambots from posting on forums, wiki, guestbook, etc. is to enable email activation. Read more of this article at Wikipedia

In order to do this with a wordpress blog it seems as though a plugin is needed so for now it’ll just get deleted.

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July 12, 2008 | Filed Under blogging 

Comments

2 Responses to “How to build this blog 11: The Scourge of Spambot jacob73kolp”

  1. admin on July 15th, 2008 4:06 pm

    Well, three days down the line and jacob73kolp has registered again, I’ll have to find a better solution.

  2. How To Build This Blog 13: The First 6 months reviewed | mental neighbo(u)rs on December 29th, 2008 12:38 am

    [...] building this blog has drawn plenty of traffic, the most popular post was about a spambot called jacob73kolp, so I have to say ‘thanks’ to them for being such a pain in the ass to some many [...]

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