Comment Spam Can Take Down Your Blog

spam I can have a very filthy mouth when pissed off. Take today for example, my dog was witness to a blistering stream of profanities as I found that my site was down. I was hit with a torrent of comment spam like nothing I’ve seen before.

Since I have my blog configured to send me an email when someone comments, the mail server was trying to send out 500 messages in five minutes. At least according to my hosting provider who turned off my site in response to the massive flood of email. All in all, the spammers posted over a thousand messages in a very short while.

This of course prompted me to perform an emergency upgrade of my blog to the latest unreleased version of Subtext. I wasn’t quite ready to perform this upgrade as I was hoping to get a few more comment spam fighting features implemented, but I was getting tired of the bombardment.

In the process I fixed a few bugs here and there, mostly related to the difference between developing on your own server but being hosted on a shared server.

At least now, I can throttle comments so that too many don’t come in all at once. This particular storm of comments appears to have originated in China (at least the comments and urls were in chinese). I think I may have to post a few posts about freedom, democracy, and the American way in order to get my blog banned in China. ;)

[Listening to: Life in Mind - Paul Oakenfold - Global Underground 007 New York CD1 (4:48)]

What others have said

Requesting Gravatar... Scott Cadillac Jun 20, 2005 10:29 PM
# re: Comment Spam Can Take Down Your Blog
I think I got hit by the same a****** over the weekend.

I've had a .Text blog for over a year, but just a week ago I finally gave up and changed everything over to a customized version of the CommunityStarterKit.

I setup a custom 302 redirect from my old urls to my new urls, so when the robot hit - everything got pushed over to my new site, which doesn't allow anonymous comments of course (and different arguments to boot).

Anyway, their 1,274 comment spams went nowhere, but it was quite a load none the less.

The IP address I tracked was 218.80.119.240, which belongs to the same ISP block as several other comment spam attempts in the past. I built in IP blocking for my custom install, but I think I'm going to build IP ranges now.

See http://www.dnsstuff.com/tools/ipall.ch?domain=218.80.119.240

Good luck with Subtext.
Requesting Gravatar... haacked Jun 20, 2005 11:13 PM
# re: Comment Spam Can Take Down Your Blog
Yeah, these spammers are real motherf*****s. I plan on implementing the MT blacklist, ip range blocking and keyword blocking soon as well as some other throttles.

Eventually I want to implement a Bayesian filter. But I want to be real careful about the usability of such a filter because bayesian filters can be "poisoned".
Requesting Gravatar... Walt Jun 21, 2005 2:14 PM
# re: Comment Spam Can Take Down Your Blog
Taiwan is an independent country. Free Tibet.

That should get you started on being banned in China.
Requesting Gravatar... haacked Jun 21, 2005 3:29 PM
# re: Comment Spam Can Take Down Your Blog
Excellent Walt! Thanks. But I was planning to wait till AFTER my brother gets back from China. ;)
Requesting Gravatar... Josh Jun 22, 2005 7:12 AM
# re: Comment Spam Can Take Down Your Blog
I woke up to the same thing yesterday morning, and this was after I implemented a few (obviously not working) spam-blocking features on my site. Same thing was happening, Chinese urls and chinese characters from the same IP address mentioned above.
Requesting Gravatar... Blogbybob.com Jun 23, 2005 2:16 PM
# re: Comment Spam Can Take Down Your Blog
I feel your pain, I got hit with 600+ today, fortunantly my mail server is on the same machine so it didn't bring anything down. I was going to get SubText since it seems to be working well for you, but the directions are all hard looking and stuff ;)

Bob
Requesting Gravatar... Nathan Jul 16, 2005 11:05 AM
# re: Comment Spam Can Take Down Your Blog
could you tell me where to get the code for your pictures preview section on your sidebar, I really like that.
Requesting Gravatar... Haacked Jul 17, 2005 9:16 PM
# re: Comment Spam Can Take Down Your Blog
Yes, that's from Flickr.com. If you create an account there, you can get code to display a "badge". That's what they call that.
Requesting Gravatar... Sarah Jan 05, 2007 1:00 PM
# re: Comment Spam Can Take Down Your Blog
Hi i have been the victim of a spammer who sends out
illegal emails saying my site contains illegal porn
all thes emails have my website name clearly advertised so it looks like i am trying to benifit from this spam
i have had my domain name turned off and lots of dogooders reporting me to various authorities there seem to be nothing i can do any ideas.

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