Missing the obvious

I’m not sure why I didn’t think of this earlier. This site has been battered by spam commenters over the last month or so, averaging about 250 - 300 a day - at first I started blocking specific IP addresses with a .htaccess file, but of late the pattern seems to have changed. It’s unusual to get more than two or three hits from the same IP address, which makes me wonder if the spammers are either a) using scripts that change the spoofed IP address on a frequent basis; or b) are using 0wn3d machines.

Then I downloaded Kitten’s Spaminator which caught about 75% of the inbound spam and killed it dead - but I couldn’t figure out a way of training it to catch the ones that were being missed. So while things were better, the spam that was getting through was still a pain.

Then last night the highly obvious piece of inspiration struck - I’ve no idea why I’ve never thought of doing this before, but there you go. The vast majority of the spam is against old posts - certainly it’s very rare to be spammed on a post which is less than 3 months old. I’m not sure why this is, but it does leave me a get-out clause for the moment, at least until I play around with the filters a bit more. A quick ‘update comment-status’ SQL query later, and comments are disabled globally for any post more than three months old. And my inbox has never been quieter…

Filed under Geek |