Helping SPAM bots

As I posted back in December (Arabs), some SPAM robots were posting to my Toot-O-Matic with Java 2 v1.4.2_05 tutorial's feedback form.

Apparently the bots see the form's textarea and submit SPAM to it as though the content will be getting published online, which it never has or ever was intended to.

After seeing my htaccess file grow and grow with no abatement to these futile attacks, I have now taken a different approach. I have removed the vast majority of IP addresses from my htaccess file. I now test for offenders first, and redirect them to another site's form page.

Currently I send them to one of the following pages:

http://add.yahoo.com/fast/help/us/ysearch/cgi_reportsearchspam

http://feedback.search.msn.com/eform.aspx?productkey=searchweb

     &page=search_feedback_form

https://rn.ftc.gov/pls/dod/wsolcq$.startup?Z_ORG_CODE=PU01

https://secure.nclforms.org/nficweb/nfic.htm

http://www.fda.gov/oc/buyonline/buyonlineform.htm

http://www.flimflam.com/feedback.htm

http://www.google.com/contact/spamreport.html

[ http://www.webguardian.com/report.html
- EDIT: webguardian is no longer in service ]

Because I believe these bots are posting SPAM primarily to influence Google, I send them there half the time. After all, why bother with me, a "middle-man"?

For example, today the user-agent:
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.5; Windows 98; KITV4.7 Wanadoo)
submitted SPAM links several times. I hope they appreciate my help.

Technorati Tags:
This entry was written by Mittineague, posted on February 23, 2007 at 5:10 pm, filed under Scripting and tagged . Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post. Post a comment or leave a trackback: Trackback URL.

Post a Comment

Your email is never shared. Required fields are marked *

*
*