Fighting the Quiet Fight
This morning, just before I left for work, I noticed that I had received 45 emails alerting me to new comments that needed to be approved/deleted in the moderation queue over at Sea Slugs! Anime Blog. Seeing as the moderation queue is mostly set up to filter out shady comments, I immediately knew what this meant: the anime blog was under attack!
Fortunately, the preliminary spam-fighting precautions I had taken managed to catch every single spam comment before any could reach the blog. So those of you who check out Sea Slugs! probably never noticed anything wrong. On the back end, however, this deeply disturbed me. The comment attack was a fairly weak one: It contained more than 4 links in the comment code, and some of the links contained words that were clearly spamtastic. Every single spam comment, however, came from a unique IP (or at least spoofed a unique IP). Also, the volume of the spam comment wave was light. I have heard tales on the WordPress support boards of spam waves that hit every single post, and even post comments to posts that have yet to be written (so that as soon as you make the post, there is a spam comment waiting for you). I’m planning on checking out some of the solutions to the spam comment problem, and possibly implementing additional defenses.
Sea Slugs! gets a fair amount of traffic, and updates quite regularly, so I am not surprised that it finally got hit with an attack. However, I want to make sure that the spam defenses don’t end up making things really annoying for real visitors. I know for a fact that IP banning is largely useless (it probably works better on annoying visitors who are real people than it does on spambots), and I also know that there are weaknesses in my current configuration. So it will be a tough balancing act between keeping spambots out and letting real visitors in. Here’s to hoping for a quick, quiet, and successful victory over the forces of spam.
Also, Sea Slugs! spam alert level has been raised to a pastel yellow-orange.
Old Blogger | Kabitzin 10/29/2004
