The spammers have decided to try crapping on my blog again. Distributed spam botfarms – Chinese, Hungarian, Latvian, Turkish, and now even Israeli (I didn’t know spam was kosher). annyway…
I had to crank up the antispam countermeasures a bit. Akismet wasn’t stopping them, so I’ve added Bad Behavior as well. Hopefully there won’t be any false positives. Bad Behavior always makes me a bit nervous, as it’s rather final and unforgiving. Both very good things if it’s right, but it’s occasionally wrong…
I had been running an out of date version of Bad Behavior on my blog because the Drupal module requires BB 1.2.4 – but I think the evil spambots were getting around that old version.
So, I just took a stab at updating my copy of bad-behavior.module to work with the latest and greatest Bad Behaviour 2.0.7. I’m not sure if I’ve missed anything, but if seems as though it’s suddenly become successful at blocking the annoying Apkakkallli spambot that has been attempting to vandalize my blog for the last few days. The server seems much more responsive, at least. Maybe it’s successfully banning evildoers?
Or, it could be just banning everyone but me? Can anyone see this? Did I bork the site and/or Bad Behavior? Stupid spammers are such a frakking waste…
I had been running an out of date version of Bad Behavior on my blog because the Drupal module requires BB 1.2.4 – but I think the evil spambots were getting around that old version.
So, I just took a stab at updating my copy of bad-behavior.module to work with the latest and greatest Bad Behaviour 2.0.7. I’m not sure if I’ve missed anything, but if seems as though it’s suddenly become successful at blocking the annoying Apkakkallli spambot that has been attempting to vandalize my blog for the last few days. The server seems much more responsive, at least. Maybe it’s successfully banning evildoers?
Or, it could be just banning everyone but me? Can anyone see this? Did I bork the site and/or Bad Behavior? Stupid spammers are such a frakking waste…
The spammers started trailing off not long after I wrote the previous post – before hitting their target of 20,000 spam attempts in 24 hours. They punked out at about 18,000 – then I closed the door with the Bad Behavior module.
It was kind of interesting leaving the spammers swarming around my blog as a honeypot, but the load was just getting annoying. Since enabling Bad Behavior, Akismet has had to deal with less than a dozen spammers getting through in about 24 hours – and I haven’t had to deal with (or even be aware of) any of them. That’s a wee bit of a change…
Bad Behavior makes me a bit nervous though, because it is rather unforgiving by design. If it thinks you’re a spammer, or if your IP has been used by a spammer, you’re locked out. No second chances. That’s good, but it’s also a bit authoritarian. There’s also no admin interface for it, so if I want to unblock someone, I have to dig around in the database to nuke the appropriate records.
I’ll keep an eye on things, but it’s pretty cool knowing that this blog could handle a pretty intense load without breaking a sweat, that spammers will not be getting in, and that it takes basically no effort on my part to maintain things. Very cool.
The spammers started trailing off not long after I wrote the previous post – before hitting their target of 20,000 spam attempts in 24 hours. They punked out at about 18,000 – then I closed the door with the Bad Behavior module.
It was kind of interesting leaving the spammers swarming around my blog as a honeypot, but the load was just getting annoying. Since enabling Bad Behavior, Akismet has had to deal with less than a dozen spammers getting through in about 24 hours – and I haven’t had to deal with (or even be aware of) any of them. That’s a wee bit of a change…
Bad Behavior makes me a bit nervous though, because it is rather unforgiving by design. If it thinks you’re a spammer, or if your IP has been used by a spammer, you’re locked out. No second chances. That’s good, but it’s also a bit authoritarian. There’s also no admin interface for it, so if I want to unblock someone, I have to dig around in the database to nuke the appropriate records.
I’ll keep an eye on things, but it’s pretty cool knowing that this blog could handle a pretty intense load without breaking a sweat, that spammers will not be getting in, and that it takes basically no effort on my part to maintain things. Very cool.