Comments on: Desperate Times….

By: Christopher Schmidt

Christopher Schmidt — Sun, 27 Feb 2005 04:45:48 +0000

d8uv: Captchas work fine for local comments, but all my spam these days (or most, anyway) is in the form of trackbacks, where you can’t do any of that kind of stuff. In addition, most of my trackbacks come from totally new hosts, so I’d rather just play it safe and block everything, and approve it myself.

For the time being, most of the spam seems to have died off, but I still occasionally get a couple dozen at once, then I block the IPs, and they go away for a while.

I really just wish spamming didn’t result in getting these people higher google rankings or clicks or whatever it is they’re looking for, so they would go away.

Randy: I don’t believe in fighting “fire with fire”. Not to mention the fact that this stuff is coming from dozens of different IP addresses: 72 different IP addresses in the iptables chain. So, it’s not something that could likely be very succesfully mounted, even assuming I did want to take that route, and I had dozens of hosts at my disposal.

By: Randy Charles Morin

Randy Charles Morin — Wed, 23 Feb 2005 05:49:51 +0000

Awesome rant! How ’bout a DDOS revenge?

By: d8uv

d8uv — Tue, 22 Feb 2005 01:57:10 +0000

Not doing a captcha, or the “Comment will only show if comment author has a previously approved comment” tickbox?

By: Christopher Schmidt

Christopher Schmidt — Mon, 21 Feb 2005 23:05:52 +0000

Jeff: Thanks for the tip. I may put that into use, however, it seems your spammers have tactics slightly different from mine. A number of the spam comments I received last night were on my most recent or second most recent post. In addition, I still get trackbacks on posts that I wrote a month ago, so I don’t really want to turn them off.

Thus far, they’ve been slowing down as I slowly block access to my machine from spamming IP addresses. That’s a plus to me, at least, even though it may mean someone can’t get to the site.

By: Jeff Licquia

Jeff Licquia — Mon, 21 Feb 2005 22:05:43 +0000

This WordPress plugin is helpful. It allows a configurable window for new posts, during which comments can be submitted without moderation. In my experience, it takes about a week for the spammers to find a new post, so using this with a 7-day window does wonders for the efficiency of moderation.

If it’s helpful, cool. Either way, hang in there.

By: George Hotelling

George Hotelling — Mon, 21 Feb 2005 20:22:31 +0000

Not that this is ethical or moral, but you could (but shouldn’t) send a decompression bomb as a gzip encoded response. Not sure how well it would work, but it might make you feel better.