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:
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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.
Chainmail Bikini
A horrible, railroading, stupid, contrived, and painfully ill-conceived roleplaying campaign. All in good fun.
Silent Hill Turbo HD II
I was trying to make fun of how Silent Hill had lost its way but I ended up making fun of fighting games. Whatever.
The Best of 2011
My picks for what was important, awesome, or worth talking about in 2011.
How I Plan To Rule This Dumb Industry
Here is how I'd conquer the game-publishing business. (Hint: NOT by copying EA, 2K, Activision, Take-Two, or Ubisoft.)
The Best of 2012
My picks for what was important, awesome, or worth talking about in 2012.
u know u could always press “search” and find it- i knew that and im 13 years old
i know no one will care about this so ill just make the sorry excuse that i wanted to say FIRST
I am 12 and not nearly as dickish as you.
Your name seriously annoys me.