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by junto 630 days ago
Strongly feels like decentralized trackbacks and pingbacks which died because they turned into spam monsters.

This turns it into a centralized problem, but a problem nevertheless?

1 comments

Honest question, is blog spam still a huge problem today if you’re not running a buggy old Wordpress stack, or better yet, not using Wordpress at all?

I would think scammers and spammers would just focus on lucrative targets like instafacetok and yelpazon reviews in 2024. And is seo hacking based on comment threads really still a viable business, or we are mainly worried about links to malware?

I get that new platforms of any kind are certainly likely to be targets of vandalism, but it’s surprising that everyone seems to be suggesting that every new/unpopular/niche platform will immediately be targeted by what amounts to organized crime. Even if I had evil intentions and an army of thousands to craft malware and scams, I wouldn’t task even one of them to poke around on platforms with less than like 10% of the market, because why bother?

> Honest question, is blog spam still a huge problem today if you’re not running a buggy old Wordpress stack, or better yet, not using Wordpress at all?

Yes, the most basic ones just go by form fields, easy to see if you expose some sort of comment form and add a hidden "first_name" field users don't see, but the bots are stupid enough to fill out all fields no matter their visibility.

The more advanced ones won't get caught in that, but there are tons of general tools for automatically spamming even hand made forms/fields on the fly.