Blog spam be gone!

Since migrating my blog content over to WordPress I’ve let the day to day gardening at my old address (notgartner.com) fall behind. The result has been a never ending stream of blog spam from bots that have figured out that if they post a link, its not going to get cleaned up within 24 hours.

Today I sat down and wrote the piece of code required to match my new WordPress URLs with my old .Text URLs. I then used the matched URLs to generate an ASP.NET 2.0 Web.config file with a <urlMappings /> element. Now – when someone hits one of my old permalinks they will be redirected to the new URL up here in WordPress. This was step three in my plan to heal the web after I moved my blog.

The upshot of this work is that most of the spam bots will either fall over at the redirect, or end up pushing their referrals through the Akismet spam filtering service. I can already see them starting to trickle in (to the shredder).