4 Responses to “For the Record”

4 Comments

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1. VC Mar 28th, 2007 at 3:15 am

   XP,

   I use CAPTCHA:
   http://www.captcha.net/

   Unfortunately, there is not much we can do about “human” spammers. I use a wildcard (*) system for foreign domains like *.ru but that blocks everyone with a .ru extension. Also, I block emails with “meds” and the like from registering. So I’m pretty well protected from bots. It’s the determined humans that are a real problem for me. Everyone wants to promote their stuff on my site which would cool if they were adding content or adding to our discussions. But most spammers just want to spam our boards and run. And that’s hard to stop.

   Un Saludo and congrats to your sister and her husband.

   -Daniel

2. XicanoPwr Mar 28th, 2007 at 4:32 am

   Thanks Daniel!

   I think I took care of my spammer problem last night. Yesterday, I spent the whole day deleting spam. I was getting about 10 per hour. Especially a couple persistent spammers. I have a feeling they were human spammers because it came from the same spam blog but different ips. It had to be the human kind because I ended up banning several ip ranges. I used to block net blocks, but I ended up blocking innocent people.

   Naw, this pendejo took advantage of the cracked WordPress code. Soon after I got some rest, I started noticing that there was a couple things that were constant. The spammer that was running the yourmedslist.com had hacked up their spam code in their headers to act like an acceptable user agent. After I figured that out, all is clear now. I have decided to go back to using the Bad Behavior plugin, which happens to be a plugin that can be used for all blogging software. Now that I have a contact link up, if people are accidentally banned, they can contact me.

3. gordo Mar 29th, 2007 at 5:38 pm

   I’ve got a captcha that gets the majority of the spams, but a lot of ‘robot spam’ gets through via the ping system. That’s how I get about 99% of the spam that gets past the captcha (about 100-300 per day). Most of it gets moderated for using “banned” words, but if you don’t want to take the time to maintain a large banned word list, you might be able to handle the problem by disabling pings.

4. XicanoPwr Mar 29th, 2007 at 9:10 pm

   I have thought about using the whole “banned” words idea, but I have seen innocent comments go into moderation because the person accidentally misspell a word. But dude, how do you keep your sanity knowing that you get about 100-300 spam per day.

   I went nuts when I deactivated Bad Behavior and got 100 spam comments. I enjoy getting emails, but not when I get over 100 letting me know I have spam in moderation.