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TrackBack Attack

I publish this site using Movable Type 3.2. It does an excellent job of detecting and sequestering comment spam -- you know, all the ads for gambling and porn sites that try hard and fail miserably to look like genuine comments. "I finds your blogg very interesting! Come play Texas Holdem blackjackk craps with me!" Most of it goes automatically into a separate Junk folder, and the few that do slip through are flagged as needing approval before they get posted. I go in about once a week and delete them all.

But I had never paid attention to my TrackBacks. Quite by accident I peeked into the TrackBack junk folder the other day, and to my horror there were nearly 5,000 entries in there. Before I deleted them, I exported a list of the titles and ran it through the very cool Wordcounter to see what the most commonly occurring words were. My wild guess was "poker." Here are the top 20 words and the number of times they occurred:

Surprisingly, "Viagra" and "sex" barely missed the top 20, ranking 22nd and 25th.

And someone doesn't know how to spell "ringtone." Morons.

UPDATE: I've gotten 16 new TrackBack spams in the two hours since I did the mass delete. OY.

May 25, 2006 11:25 AM