yarbroughs dot org

Update on the spam fun I was having…

As I stated earlier, I got 239 Spams on 12/30, with another 59 arriving between midnight and 2am on the 31st. After mentioning that, I went off in search of New Years Shopping (to include the bicycle that son was owed from Christmas).

I came home to an awful shock… 106 more spams, all p0rn-related, between noon and 1:30 — and all actually showed up on the site! It was maddening, seeing spam that actually slipped through both the Spaminator and the moderation list.

The same spammer hit me on 1/1, but I was ready… one keyword added to the moderation list and the Spaminator did the rest. 287 (!!) comments, MOST from the guy who hit me on New Year’s Eve, stopped before you could see links to pictures of shemales, Serena Williams, and mature XXX. I had 305 total spams on 1/1 — the remainder came from my relatively tame “byob” friend.

I’d had it, though… that was over 700 spam comments in 3 days. Most of them were coming from a script that wasn’t actually giong to the webpage and “clicking” the comment forms — it was submitting directly from the file on the webserver that handles comments.

Along came Matt’s “wp-hashcash” plugin. What Matt has done (with help and inspiration) is require one to go through the normal processes to comment, because he hides a value in the comments form. That value is generated by javascript, as well… so it makes it MUCH harder to spam the site… for the moment, anyway.

The lone drawback is that javascript MUST be enabled in your browser to leave a comment. However, looking at the 268 hits I got in 2004 from a Lynx browser (compared to over 165,000 from other browsers) I’m not upset.

Today? 28 spams, all from my little “byob” friend. Matt’s plugin didn’t STOP spam, but it reduced it to a manageable level. And that’s fine with me.

The 6-8 of you that normally comment here: If for some reason you can’t anymore, contact me… ben at yarbroughs dot org.