T w e n t y S i d e d

This morning was a new record: Ninety (90!!!) spam comments from one “person”. Amazing. His bot left comments on over half the posts on this site. My spam-filter caught them all and held them for moderation, but I still had to go through the list and make sure no real comments got caught in the net.

This is crazy. I’ve rejected every spam he’s fired at my site, and he (his bot) seems to respond by sending MORE. It seems like it would be in a spammer’s best interest to detect where their spam gets through and where it doesn’t, and to skip sites that block it. Wouldn’t this guy prefer to save his time and bandwidth for sites that are vulnerable?

Den Beste was nice enough to suggest .htaccess files as a way to deal with this, which is a very arcane form of black magic used to control Apache webservers. He warned that the config could be a little tricky. He was a not kidding. Even if Steve Wozniak and Harry Potter teamed up to help me, I don’t think I could get this working right. Sigh.

I said before that my web hosting service doesn’t let me block IP addresses. Look closely at the following image and see if you can spot the tool that might help me with this:

I’m an idiot. I can’t believe I didn’t see it before. Particularly since I WAS LOOKING FOR IT. I can’t believe I’ve been manually sorting spam with this tool sitting there, unused.

So I blocked the offending IP’s, and I expect that will take a big, big bite out of the spam I have to look at every morning.

Jerks.

UPDATE: Looks like it really works. In the last 24 hours I’ve had to deal with 4 spam comments. So, about 98% of my spam was coming from the small group of IP’s I banned. Very satisfying.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.