Has anyone noticed?

Alex · 09-26-2009, 11:55 PM

The amount of spam going around lately? I have been getting hit big time. Over the past few days the same IP addresses have been visiting my site and trying to spam. I discovered .htaccess

and think its a blessing to have in place. My forum is holding up well though, only a few get thru but the others just hang out on the home page.

Anyone have a list of IP's that i should block that are known to be spammers or know any resources i can use to help further prevent this garbage from going on?

Thanks guys!

**Krilnon** · 09-27-2009, 12:10 AM

I'm sure most of the active mods around here have noticed a lot of spam… I certainly have. We've blocked certain IP ranges that had only ever had spam users. Doing that seems to help for a while, but we still get plenty of spam, since the IP ranges that spammers use tend to shift eventually (which makes sense).

Recently, Kirupa did something with footer permissions so that newly registered members couldn't create footers until they posted around 10 times. I don't know if he has determined whether or not it's cutting down on spam posts, but it's definitely cutting down on the number of actual spam links that are generated.

Alex · 09-27-2009, 12:17 AM

Seems like an uphill battle to me

I used .htaccess to block them out and it seemed to clear them out for the time being. I will look into doing the IP range. The forums are coming with better tools against this type of stuff but it seems they always have the 1 up on us.

Templarian · 09-27-2009, 12:33 AM

I'm close to blocking Russia myself, but other than that it doesn't seem to bad.

And here reporting threads seems to get the messages deleted pretty quickly. It's funny getting spam without links like Krilnon said.

TheCanadian · 09-27-2009, 01:05 AM

Haha blocking Russia, that's hilarious.

Anogar · 09-27-2009, 04:40 AM

I use iptables to forward spammer URLs to Goatse mirrors. (Way better than .htaccess - it never even hits your Apache server - or whatever server you're running.)

I was using a TARPIT for a while but this made me giggle.

**kirupa** · 09-27-2009, 05:26 AM

Spam has definitely gotten worse over the past year, and no matter how much extra we do to combat it, they find clever ways around it. I mention "they" because it seems like the spam, at least on the forums here, are from real humans as opposed to bots.