The Spam Has Arrived

I first noticed it on a Netlify deploy preview. A faceless mention from ‘admin’ at ‘imoneyhub’.

I assumed right away it must be spam, but I’m glad I clicked through. It turns out Geoff Graham wrote a lovely CSS-Tricks reply about his own struggle setting up webmentions, and some of the Wordpress plugins that can help.

But I didn’t see a mention from CSS-Tricks (at least not right away). Instead, Geoff’s post has been re-posted by ‘admin’ on a long list of random URLs, all (web)mentioning my original post. The webmention.io dashboard shows me all of them (with a few legit mentions scattered through):

All of these mentions made it into my local cache, but only one made it into a build. It seems the rest were caught in a simple filter that came from Max Böck’s Eleventy Webmentions starter. It’s a quick JS function that ensures every mention has an author name and a timestamp.

// only allow webmentions that have an author name and a timestamp
const checkRequiredFields = (entry) => {
  const { author, published } = entry;
  return Boolean(author) && Boolean(author.name) && Boolean(published);
};

That caught all but one of the spam mentions (‘admin’ made it through!), but it also caught the mention from CSS-Tricks, which doesn’t include Geoff’s info, a timestamp, or even content. So I already have both false negatives and false positives in my filtering. Fun!

I can go through these by hand, and delete/block each one in the dashboard. I also have to delete them in my local cache. And while I’m at it, I’ve added author info in the cache for Geoff? We’ll see if that sticks. But there has to be a better way, right?

Right?

There has to be a better way, right?