MoreCooler.com: It's more cooler with the thing

We gotta bit of a problem. Check the Ninja. It's only been hitting older posts, so I didn't notice it.

That is so stupid. Could that actually fool anyone into clicking? Maybe if we had a lot of traffic, but they are advertising to, what, 10 people? Or is it merely the presence of the links they want?

My favorite are:
"For some reason"

"How about those fairies?"

"You are right ofcourse... But... "

And the best is...
"If not, what were all the witch trials about?"

"die Reet is anders een gemene man..."

"Okay, ik ga ze plaatsen op m'n web-log. :)"

Without limiting the comments in some way, there doesn’t seem to be any text in theirs that could be recognized. We could start a black list of some sort, but I imagine that would require constant updates. I notice they put up about 8 at a time, all at once. Could we check for, say, 5+ comments all within a minute and block them?

Although it looks like whomever hosts the sites that are being linked to is being kept aware of the problem.. I tried several of the links and they were all down one way or another..

Now they have click-throughs! ^_^

Yeah, I clicked 'em too - and got redirected to Yahoo - but I'm not sure if their site was smoked by their ISP or if these links were just to test if this site would click ads. Maybe these are just to build a list of blogs/forums where ads can be posted.

Or more frightening, perhaps there's malicious code before the redirect, which we're missing because of Firefox / IE crit updates.

Fun stuff. Other than X comments per X minutes, any other ideas on how to limit this?

Maybe a simplistic version of those "type the code shown in this JPEG" thingies for non-registered viewers?

just do some simple math or wordplay instead of an image:
"What's 5 x 3 ?" "What is every other letter of the word 'morecooler'?" ..

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHH! I mean, yeah, that makes sense. I'll think about how best to do it.

Damn it! I just had that idea, and I find Matt wrote it down already. I went to bed at 9 last night, and woke up with the thought. So I don't know which one of us had it first......