Salocin

Weblog Spam Arms Race

This weblog receives a lot of spam. On average, I get about 5 spam per minute during the US waking hours. That's a fair amount of hits, and the problem is often that even if the hit is averted by a blacklist-style program (most of them are prevented from becoming a part of the live website), it still creates a 'hit', causes a perl program to run and a page to be transmitted to the offending webserver.

Yesterday, the number of hits to my website by automated spam-bots spiralled out of all proportion, and my hosting provider disabled the mt-comment script, sending me an email to let me know what had been done.

I don't know how many hits it takes before a hosting company stands up and takes notice, but I imagine it's a fair few. I have now upgraded Movable Type, and am in the process of installing all sorts of plugins that will assist in the avoidance of spam. It is particularly frustrating that this has had to happen, and I don't know if it will be enough.

It's also particularly annoying that the spammers are too crude in their methods to realise that 99% of their spams are not getting through, and that those that do make it are deleted within a couple of hours, because I do keep my website graffiti free. I get very annoyed at people using what it essentially my personal internet real-estate as a billboard for their (often unpleasant) products, and often wish that there were some way to return the unpleasantness that they have visited upon me.

I therefore apologise for the additional difficulties you may experience in posting comments to the website, but assure you that they are necessary. Should you have any problems, please let me know. Going forward, you will need to have javascript enabled in order to post to the website, and you will need to type in a code on the comments submission page for your comment to be accepted.