…And the spam they spew.

I have a few rules in place to trip up most spammers: a quick mod_rewrite rule that matches a POST to the comment form with no referrer, a condition that would only happen with spam bots; Akismet to bounce most comments that do make it through; periodic IP bans to make sure that those that get tripped up in Akismet don’t do it again.

The final step is this page, which does a SELECT DISTINCT on all posts that are from the past three days and moderated as spam. Generally I’ll view it and get between 3 and a dozen IPs. I don’t do this all that regularly, maybe once a week or twice a month. Today I looked again, and noticed that there are currently 130 different IPs listed. I’d like to just ban the whole city of Chicago, as a huge amount of spam is coming from there for some reason. (Actually, they all seem to be coming from FDC, a big data center there… Maybe I should write their abuse department.)

I’ve just banned 128 IPs. (I love how the number keeps going down, as people age out of the list.)

For the bloggers here who aren’t using Akismet, you can sign up at WordPress.com and get an API key, which you then paste into the requisiste tab in the Plugins section of your Dashboard. It should help keep a lot of spam at bay.

I’m not sure what happened, but the server locked up hard. I manually rebooted it and it didn’t come back up. Tech support was able to reboot it, and things are coming back up… Except for, oddly, the main page. That’s a work in progress.

The server is seemingly on its last legs, so I may expedite my attempts to move to the new server on a virtual machine.

The timestamps are based on a fixed offset from UTC, and thus didn’t adjust appropriately for Daylight Savings Time. (Or lack thereof? I have no idea which we’re in?) I just wrote a little script to update a given “option” for each blog on the site, so now everyone’s in the correct timezone.

For anyone who got an e-mail that they had comments in their moderation queue, and then logged in to find nothing, don’t fret. I did another round of spam tweaking today, so I first handled all the moderation queues to get everything classified right, and then banned all IPs that spammed in the past three days.

Incidentally, I haven’t yet looked into how to flush rules from iptables, so one might assume that only banning people who’ve spammed in the past 72 hours would mean that they’re also banned for 72 hours. In actuality, they’re banned indefinitely, until “read iptables documentation to figure out how to use it” stops having a dozen more important things above it (like “find a job”).

In any case, your moderation queue is empty, the spam filters have been freshly updated, and we’ve got a new blogger. So, uhh, post stuff!