Thread

that would probably catch http://www.opendns.com/ clients as well, though (who are “legitimately” using proxy servers)?

It should not (I don’t know about this script itself) openDNS only improves name resolution it does not mask the IP….at least last time I looked at it.
Even bigger problem is people using legit apps to do so.
Depends on your level but there is no anonymous surfing and they can pull the logs if it becomes a huge dispute.
At the end of the day…if you are a ‘target’ then it is tiring process to keep blocking IPs.
But it is in your favor, it is a lot easier to ban than to register/post…it just sucks to deal with it.

There are rel-follow search engines out there that target sites which do not put rel=“no-follow” attributes to links in comments. They are used to find keyword relevant entries to drop off some links by spammers. I have a page that ranks very high in some of them for the killer-keyword “seo”.

In that entry I get lots of hand-crafted spam, mostly from agencies that sell so-called “seo services”. Only that they spam in that particular entry to build links for themselves while they sell the same service to other people for their keywords.

Lately I visited the site of one of those agencies and saw that they offer “quality link-building” by posting comments in keyword-relevant weblogs. “Hand crafted, on-topic and at least 10 words long”.
I was curious, so I contacted them and inquired their rate for deploying 50 comments. They offered me to do the job within 5 days for USD $100.
Based on that I asked for a commission of $1.75 for every comment they had left on my site. Sadly they did not answer…

You might also encounter google-search referrers with a keyword combination of

"Notify me of follow-up comments" "remember my personal information" advertising

That are either bots or real people looking for comment-forms where they can leave spam related to “advertising” or whatever keyword the need.

Well, the spam has slowed down, but it seems as if people are being hired to leave spam!

I wrote an entry on linux, and got this gem in the comments:

Hi, i am searching for some useful information about different topics like (LINK SCRUBBED) and
find your blog. you have done very well in this blog and also your provided information
is 100% correct and guaranteed. Thanks a lot for providing enough information.

Does this actually work? Oh well. Added to the blacklist.