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Montserrat is spamming me!

This is weird. Suddenly, I started getting comment spam through the random generators. I understand comment spam coming from the WordPress install or from the Drupal install that runs Clear Night Sky. Both are well-known blogging platforms, and you can figure that a comment posted will appear on the site (except that I moderate all comments on this site). But the comment button from the random generators? They just generate emails to me. Every few months I pick the funniest ones and post them to the Random Generators Blog, but there’s no hope for these guys that somehow I’d mistake their comments for anything other than spam.

So, I tried changing the name of the action module, and I tried adding a hidden variable to the form. It’s not a simple hack that submits to the form action. It must be a real person or a relatively sophisticated robot that reads the form page and then submits. I think it’s real people, probably in some distant place where people get paid to paste spam into comment forms.

I looked at the HTTP headers coming from these submits and they all go through proxies, presumably to mask that they are coming from Montserrat, a tiny Caribbean island. But going through proxies means I get a very different set of HTTP headers which are somewhat mangled. So, I tweaked the code to look for one of the consistent differences. Those people now get a message that the comment went through, but email really gets sent. Plus, I added a 20 second delay.

I hope they don’t read this blog. 🙂