June 29, 2004

SPAM ALERT!!

A quick announcement. In the past two days this web site has been seriously spammed by purveyors of filth... and not that fine kind of artsy filth either. Forty comments have been received with links to various disgusting sites involving "hot action down on the farm" and "the game that only families can play" and I am not talking about stuff from Parker Brothers! The comments have been laboriously deleted. In response to this I am no longer allowing html code in comments, nor am I allowing anonymous comments (sorry Jeff). The long list of IP addresses has been added to the banned list, and other actions will be taken including spam bots. I do not want to disable comments altogether, but it may come to that for a brief time if ways can not be found to end this recent assault.

Posted by Will Burnham on Tue Jun 29, 2004 | Comment on this entry | TrackBack
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Well, we wouldn't want your blog turning into a farm sex porn site, so I'll relent.

I don't know if your back end supports throttling, but throttling down to 1-2 connections per second will keep out almost all bots, both harvesters and spammers without noticable effect on people (who are lucky if they can generate a connection every 2 seconds or so).

Posted by: jeff on June 29, 2004 01:45 PM

Uggghhh.... I just started getting those spam about two hours ago. Up to six posts already. I have already turned of the html thing in the posts but they can still add the link to their "posted by" names. I don't know how to stop that. How rude.

Posted by: Randy on June 30, 2004 07:49 PM

Install MT Blackist:
http://www.jayallen.org/projects/mt-blacklist/

Works pretty good and it makes deleting that stuff sooooo easy.

Posted by: Brian the Red on June 30, 2004 07:59 PM

I too have been attacked...it sucks big time. I hope you find a solution....so far they haven't found my photoblog...guess I should be happy I am pretty much non existent. ;)

Posted by: Martie on July 1, 2004 12:43 AM

Have you tried changing the names of the comment-adding files in MT? It seems to me that the bots would be looking for comment.php or whatever; they wouldn't notice wibble.php, whatever its function.

Posted by: Somewhat on July 1, 2004 11:05 AM