dsandler.org

Kevin Burton: Nasty New Trackback Spam. The main technique in this case exploits the fact that TypePad allows HTML in a place where it shouldn’t (an easy fix), but this caught my eye:

This is the first attack I’m aware of that specifically attempts to thwart backlink checkers like the Trackback Validator I helped with this past summer. When we started the project, we predicted that trackback spammers would either give up and go home (ha!) or they’d continue with the arms race and develop some kind of dynamic spam page in response.

There are a couple of reasons why I think this means that the spammers have essentially lost:

In a sense, these are the central goals of any anti-spam effort: to increase the costs to spammers, and to decrease the costs (in terms of time, PageRank, money, etc.) to recipients.