Comment Spam

Last year I wrote about the large amount of comment spam that this site was getting. Readers kindly pointed me at a couple of useless resources and over the next few months I worked through most of Yoz’s suggestions. Most of these worked for a while, but the spammers found ways round most of these blocks so eventually I installed MT-Blacklist. This has been working well for months now. I still get a few pieces of spam each week but they are easy to remove and I only ever get each piece of spam once.

Recently I realised that MT-Blacklist is logging its actions so I can see how effective it it. The results were very surprising. My activity log goes back to June 13th and in that time MT-Blacklist has stopped 2269 spam commented from being created. That’s a lot of comments that I would have had to delete manually.

And it also logs the IP address that the comments come from. Here’s a list of the most prolific spam commenting IP addresses on this site:

213.91.217.78 (487)
213.91.216.36 (457)
213.91.217.77 (401)
66.144.4.5 (144)
61.30.47.22 (119)
213.91.207.89 (104)
61.30.47.21 (87)
64.110.74.244 (49)
213.131.70.6 (32)
216.79.8.162 (30)
67.30.130.142 (20)
69.50.130.173 (19)
12.104.44.40 (15)

I expect that those addresses could be useful for working out which netblocks to completely deny access to the internet or something l.ke that.

Then this morning it seems that that the war has just escalated again. I found a dozen or so entries that contained links to random (and non-existant) web sites. It seems that the spammers are just testing us to see if we’ll give up deleting stuff if there’s just too much of it.

In a week I’m off on holiday with probably no access to the internet. I wonder how much of a mess I’ll come back to.