[SURBL-Discuss] Guestbook spam

[Michael Renzmann]

Hi.

Jeff Chan wrote:
> You could do this, but the set of guestbook spammers and mail
> spammers may not overlap too much.  Therefore we somewhat
> recommend against it.  (Remember that SURBLs are URIs advertised
> in email spams.)

I'm about to write a spam filter plugin for Trac [1] which makes use of 
SURBLs. While Trac is no guestbook, trac-driven sites are hit by spam 
posts which have, following to your comment, more in common with 
guestbook spam than with email spam.

That makes me wonder:
a.) Is there a SURBL (outside of surbl.org) available already specially 
for website spam?
b.) If not, would it be worthwile to extend the focus of surbl.org to 
website spam?

The mentioned plugin will be one of several that users can enable. Each 
plugin will modify the karma of a post (Wiki edit, new trouble ticket, 
comment to existing trouble ticket, ...), and only if the karma is above 
a user-defined threshold it will be accepted.

As the old version of Trac we use currently on madwifi.org does not 
provide native support for spam filtering, I installed another solution 
[2] based on mod_security to block spams. In order to adjust the filters 
if needs be, I logged (and still log) all spam postings that hit our 
site during the last 4 months (~38000 posts total). Is that interesting 
for feeding the database of a specialized website spam SURBL?

Bye, Mike

[1] http://trac.edgewall.org
[2] http://madwifi.org/wiki/FightingTracSpam