Interview with a link spammer
This “Interview with a link spammer | The Register” is a very interesting interview with somebody who’s bugging public blogs with comment/link spam.
“So Sam, like other link spammers, uses the thousands of ‘open proxies’ on the net. These are machines which, by accident (read: clueless sysadmins) or design (read: clueless managers) are set up so that anyone, anywhere, can access another website through them. Usually intended for internal use, so a company only needs one machine facing the net, they’re actually hard to lock down completely.”
This validates mt-proxyplug as a means to get rid of comment spam. Since I have it running on my web site I had to deal with only a few comment spam submissions here.
Also, Sixapart’s Professional Network seems to have picked up the story and issues recommendations on how to avoid the problem.