…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.