Well, the blog comment and trackback spam have held up well. I wish I could say as much for the referral spam blocking.

For most of the month it did a pretty good job of blocking spam. Some spammers blew through initially with a hundred or two spams before I could add their domains to the blacklist, which I knew would happen. After being added to the blacklist, some still got through, but were restricted to just a few spams per day. By the 20th of July, the top 25 referrers were still mostly legit. But then things fell apart.

The culprit was a German porn spammer, who came in with three different domains (tzz.de, axxs.de, and cxa.de). I added the domains to the blacklist, but they continued to blow through with new subdomains until 14 of the top 25 spots on the referrer list were jammed with their crap. Although they did not post the thousands of spam that they could have, they mucked up my referral list enough to make it butt-ugly again. At least I have the satisfaction of never having given these scumwads even the tiniest bit of benefit for all their troubles. They’ve made things miserable in terms of my reading my stats, but they have not gotten an ounce of Google Juice nor a single referral from me and they never, never will.

In the end, the 18 spammers in the top 25 left behind 2427 referral spams. Take away the German porn spammer and that number drops to 4 spammers leaving 492 spams.

So it seems that the AwStats referral patch, while useful to some degree, is far from perfect. The question now is, will more spammers follow in blowing through it, or were the last few weeks a fluke?

As for comment and trackback spam, I have found an interesting trend: it’s dying down. Where it used to be flooding in at the rate of thousands per day, it has subsided to a trickle of only a few hundred a day (most of them coming from a porn web host). Why they’ve so dramatically dropped off, I don’t know for sure; maybe they detect the new version of Movable Type, figure it’s no longer worth trying, and move along? Beats me. But I like it.