After three months of near-silence, I’m back. Project M is nearly ready for beta (six months of work so far, and it’s still not quite usable… sheesh!), so I think I can spare the time to blog again. I may not write daily for a bit, but I’ll try.
The first thing I’d like to write about is the comment-spam problem. As long-time readers know, I’ve got a multi-layered setup that deals with that very well — so well that I have zero problem with false positives, and almost no spam gets through even the first layer. But I’ve been seeing an oddly large number of messages caught by the second layer in the last few months, so I took a look at the statistics.
There have been a jaw-droppingly large number of spam attempts recently. In the last six months of 2010, there were something like 42,000. In the first three months of 2011, I’ve already had 154,373!
(Smug note: the “oddly large number of messages caught by the second layer” mentioned above, which are the only ones that I even need to glance at out of that huge number, has amounted to something like twenty messages. 😉 )
Apparently no one else is seeing this kind of massive spam increase, so I did a little digging. It appears that almost all of these attacks are pounding on a single post. It has been the most popular post on this blog since it was first published at the end of June, and its popularity has been steadily growing in the months since. It’s now nearly a hundred times more popular than it was even then. And considering its content, I’m certain that its popularity was entirely with spam-bots.
(I have no idea why an army of spam-bots selected that post to attack. It’s got a number of legitimate comments, but that’s the only odd thing I’ve noticed about it.)
I’ve closed the comments on that post, which should put a halt to the flood. We’ll see how that goes.
Looks like closing the comments on that one solved the problem — in the last two days, I’ve only had about 120 spam attempts on various articles, rather than the nearly 3,500 that I would have gotten previously on that one article. 🙂
But HG, don’t you want your blog to be popular?? 😉
I’d really prefer that it was popular because people want to read my drivel, rather than being popular as a place spammers can post their odious wares.
But HG, quantity always beats quality! Just think, super-sized fast-food, SUVs, and of course, Microsoft Windows.
I eat at home, I drive a Corolla, and I use Linux and Mac OS. 😉
Stop making sense, that’s no fair in a debate.
All’s fair in love and war. And this is a skirmish in the Spam War. 😉
For future reference, the spam count blocked by my second layer of defenses is now 154,706. I’ve added another layer of anti-spam defenses, we’ll see how they affect that number.