This is just *madness*: more than a thousand attempted comment spams a day
Logged on to collect my email on the home dialup.
More than a thousand messages. Not spam; I get an email every time a spammer attempts to post junk here in the comments posting to their online poker (haha, see how ya like that, spammers) sites. It tells me the IP where the attempted spam came from.
This afternoon I sent over a list to my web administrator blocking pretty much all the rest of the world apart from Europe, the US, and certain bits of Australia and New Zealand. (Plus someone in Singapore.) I’ve really got to hope that he hasn’t implemented it yet.
Phew. Looking at the IPs of the messages, he hasn’t. But um, those people worrying about DDOSing spammers? Excuse me, this costs money serving their pointless attempts to spam. They are parasites. How should we treat parasites? How does a doctor? You make life intolerable for them.
- These posts might be related (the database thinks..):
- Sometimes you forget that there are clueless spammers too (18 January 2005; score: 63.23%)
- The wrong way to defend against comment spam (14 December 2004; score: 46.05%)
- ISP Prime and Phantographics - fraudsters or just incompetent? (21 May 2005; score: 42.09%)
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December 8th, 2004 at 10:02 am
The “days till BT offers me broadband” looks very poignant this morning. A small practical suggestion: why not have the attempts written to a log file, then zipped up once a day, instead of being emailed one by one?
December 8th, 2004 at 11:50 am
That might be a good idea. (I mean, it is a good idea, but it also requires me getting a cron job sorted on the server. If I could do that there are far more interesting things I could do.) Certainly writing to a log file is a better way of handling it.
Even simpler, you would hope, is to edit the .htaccess file, which is probably happening now, and to stop getting the attempted spams and hence the reports.
Yes, the broadband thing is a real pain. I think that Pierre Danon leaving BT is hardly going to speed things up, either.
Interestingly the spam attempts at present are coming from 213.91.216.36 which http://www.ripe.net/whois?form_type=simple&full_query_string=&searchtext=213.91.216.36 shows is the Bulgarian Telecommunications Company - within the RIPE (Europe) area, so it will require quite fine editing of .htaccess to stop this lot.
I shall write a book in which a spammer comes to a sticky end, I believe.
December 8th, 2004 at 12:12 pm
It should be possible to add a confirmatory step along the lines of the TMDA (Tagged Message Delivery Agent) system.
Not bombproof but combinable with a white and blacklist, and arguably allowing you to collect a clear agreement to pay if you set an advertising charge. A high charge. Not for the money but for the expected default, which is less easily argued about than the use of comments. Perhaps.
December 8th, 2004 at 12:45 pm
If 213.91.216.36 belongs to an ISP all you have to do is to mail the ISPs abuse address with the IP address and the time of the attack. They’ll issue a warning to that account and then they’ll shut it down if there’s a further complaint.
December 8th, 2004 at 1:07 pm
Steve, it’s Bulgaria! And not the great-uncle from the Wombles either! I’d be delighted if they even understood what I said in the email, let alone acting on it. Yes, I do try, but there’s a certain feeling that it’s not making any difference.
December 8th, 2004 at 1:09 pm
This IP is a serial offender already…google “213.91.216.36″.
December 8th, 2004 at 3:27 pm
Why is it hard to do cron jobs on your server? (alt version: why aren’t you on pair.com if it is?)
December 9th, 2004 at 6:20 pm
I think you’re being picked on!
I’m running a wordpress blog (1.2.1) and since I installed Kittens’ Spaminator I’m free of any spam (I’m also free of comments but that’s another story).
My guess is that your blog gets more attention than mine because it gets more readers or ranks higher in Google or something. But why the disparity between so many users of the same blogging software?
December 14th, 2004 at 9:19 pm
Defending against the comment spammers
I agree with The Independent’s Charles Arthur. In an article in the paper, and repeatedly on his blog, Charles complains about the flood of pointless drivel bombarding web log comment systems the world over. I used to think e-mail…