I’ve been getting a lot of feelers for trackback spam lately, so I’ve installed Kitten’s Spaminator plug-in.

So far it’s working a treat.

Long-term, though, I think we need to respond to spammers at their source: their customers.

I can think of lots of ways to do this, such as respond-bots that pollute their databases with random (but sane) values.

“You bet I want to learn more about CAS1NO VIAAAAGRA CIAILS ROLLEX”, the ‘bot would say when it got a spam, “gonna go to your site to buy me some of that hot stock before it ‘explodes tomorrow’– just as soon as I pick a random value from the known-invalid credit card list!”

Wouldn’t that be great, if the identity thieves paid good money to the spammers for a list of marks, only to find that most of the identities were completely bogus bot-spawn?

Or even better: specially-crafted values being back-tracked by the authorities?