That’s the name of the game.

Category : annoying + internet + software

So I spent the better half of my morning today playing spam warrior. Apparently there’s an exponential upsurge in spam hitting everyone or I’ve been targeted. So far I’ve received a whopping 500 spam comments in the past 24 hours and as soon as I cleared it there were a dozen more. All of this has forced me to rethink some of the discussion policies due to the dramatic increase of retardation from people attempting to peddle boner medication, sex sites and everything in between.

A quick check on Akismet stats proves I’m not alone, and that’s only mildly reassuring. But still it has stirred me up enough to want to cause physical harm to the idiots behind a few addresses who’s servers are mindlessly pushing all this crap. Am I wrong in thinking that people don’t fall for this crap anymore? Or is this part of some larger endgame?

Because after over 900 failed attempts (500 of which occurred in the past 24 hours) at spamming me, they still persist. Two IP addresses - 81.95.146.227 and 81.177.22.236 - have been hitting non-stop commenting dozens of times every few minutes. And for some odd reason my rewrite rules to block them didn’t even appear to have much of an effect, which makes me think I need to check those rules for errors. Either way whoever coded these spam bots is a total fucking moron.

For the meantime I’ve pulled commenting and pings on older posts as I figure out how to solve this. I’ll leave the latest post open for comments to see what happens, based upon the trend I’ve seen it appears that a majority of the spam is targeted at older open posts. So there’s a good chance they’re only bottom feeders hitting on stuff that’s cached elsewhere.

Either way, it’s fairly pathetic that some advertisers and businesses stoop so low if they’re legitimate while trying to get their “business” noticed. I’ll admit that it’s noticed, but not in the good way. And if I were to have the pleasure of meeting the owners of this “business” and their spammy offspring I’d love to introduce my baseball bat to all their computer equipment.

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  • Comments

  1. glix - March 21st, 2007 @ 11pm

    Fcked I concur.
    This is rediculously problematic, I am sorting shit on horde/gmail for 100 domains.
    One solution for old_neccesary_email_accounts is to set up an autoresponder explaining the spam overdose and a phone # for a new email address, or a link i guess, with an encoded mailto: (source scrambled), but emails slip thru that rigorous of a process, ie get auto marked spam /are mistaken as spam.
    So Ive seen some emails asking me to click and verify the person for spam protection, but i dont want to sign up for one of those either, ive not researched it at all yet tho, but it looks unprofessional, and could deter emails again, for being mistaken as spam!)
    fecktzrds

  2. Lech - March 22nd, 2007 @ 7am

    I honestly believe that no matter how hard you try to hide any email address out there, it’s going to get discovered eventually… While mail spam is one thing; it’s expected and we all know it’s lame, but comment spam is getting to be just as bad if it’s not already worse. Both are equally as anonymous which is a real problem considering that I can mail you from any fake reply-to address and it probably wouldn’t make too much difference unless your server is verifying each address as it arrives. But this would prove futile if you’re getting hit and your server can’t cope under the strain. All in all it’s a bit lame and while I know there’s a solution out there somewhere, implementing it any form is going to be a total pain next to having people adopt it.

    The price we pay for a spam free world, right? Spammers are fairly lame, and the fact that they make any legitimate money at all by it simply amazes me. Mainly due to the fact that it proves there’s an enormous amount of stupid people out there gullible enough to willingly pay for these “services”. Otherwise it’s just obvious credit and bank fraud, but if you’re stupid enough to be caught giving your info without knowing where your information is going then I guess you deserve it…

  3. glix - March 23rd, 2007 @ 8am

    masking email addresses:
    http://www.projecthoneypot.org/how_to_avoid_spambots_2.php

  4. Lech - March 23rd, 2007 @ 3pm

    Munging works to a degree, but any good harvester will have routines that can read right through it. If you want to hide your email address and not get spam at all, don’t give out or post your email address. But that’s about the same as not having an email address in the first place.

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