Phillip Pearson - web + electronics notes

tech notes and web hackery from a new zealander who was vaguely useful on the web back in 2002 (see: python community server, the blogging ecosystem, the new zealand coffee review, the internet topic exchange).

2004-5-4

Topic Exchange: starting to think more about the spam problem

It seems that, at least over the past few days, the Topic Exchange has become much more popular with the spammers. Either that or I've just been looking more closely.

Most of the spam seems to come in via TrackBack. Not sure yet whether the spammers are using browsers or automated tools to do the posting. Just started tracking user agents used for posting, so this should give me a good picture of the ones that aren't trying to fake anything.

Time to go study SpamBayes a bit more, with an eye to using it in the ITE at some point.

Seb Paquet had a good idea on the ite-users mailing list today -- let users import OPML subscription lists and generate filtered RSS for them that only includes items that they are subscribed to. Fun! I want to do this if I have time.

Talking of time, I've been promising people lots of things recently, but I don't have much time. So if I promise something then disappear for ages without a word, sorry, I may have been a bit optimistic, and have probably forgotten. Sorry again! Do drop me a line though.

... more like this: []