Abandoned message boards

All morning, we've been getting spam from the Ukrainian porn trackback spammers, mostly with links to a certain sort of message boards: WWWBoard, which is one of a collection of scripts originally written by Matt Wright (yes, that Matt Wright who wrote the infamous and often abused FormMail script).

Matt's scripts are now supported by a SourceForge project, but old versions are still widely used. Case in point: The above-mentioned WWWBoard script.

It seems like our "friends" here have picked lots of abandoned WWWBoard scripts from all over the web, spammed them to death and are now sending out trackback spam pointing to those boards. When you follow such a link, you are redirected elsewhere, e.g. to subdomains at atspace.com (who seem to have taken those sites down already - kudos to them!).

I've been sending emails to the owners of those abandoned sites all morning, but don't really expect any replies. But to anyone out there running a website:

• When you abandon your site, please take it down entirely or at least disable the "interactive" parts like message boards or guestbooks.
• Avoid Matt's script (and their successors from the nms project) like the plague. Choose something else instead, preferrably something with spam protection and the ability to block posters and IP addresses.
• If you're still running any of Matt's or the nms project's scripts, please at least update them to their latest version.

The trackback spam itself is coming from the usual IP ranges: 85.255.113.* and 85.255.114.*, so if you haven't done so already, I'd strongly recommend you block those. I've also send another note to the owner of that IP range (inhoster.com), but don't really expect a reply, despite the note on their site saying that they follow up on all abuse reports. After all, this has been going on for months now ...