This weekend my Contact page got spammed. It’s now rewritten and using a few blacklists (including Akismet) among other techniques to eliminate spam. Should be much better now. I also think the handling of attachments should be better.
The spam appeared to be from a botnet, based on the fact that no 2 seemed to have the same IP address. So just blocking IP’s wasn’t an option.
Now things should be even better.
Jay Allen takes a break, and myself, and many others are being pounded by spammers. His last update seems to have been 2004-10-30 16:18:38+01:00. Since then, it’s been a nightmare. At least 50 since I went to bed last night (at 2:00 AM). Now at 10:00 (no morning classes, so I slept in until 9:00), I’m cleaning up from a few hours sleep.
There’s got to be a real solution to comment spam.
I’m still considering switching to WordPress since I know PHP rather well, and use a nice CAPTCHA system to protect the blog.
Habeas, an company who sells copyrighted x-header tags, known as “Habeas Warrant Mark” to companies who abide by their rules regarding spam, in return for avoiding spam filters (yes copyrights actually can benefit the internet community). It has a rather large backing from email providers and spam filters. Habeas has recently been under attack. As of about 11 AM, PST, Sunday January 11, 2004, an “unknown spammer” has been using the tags. The spam often has a title similar to “Get X(a)n@x, Valï(u)m, V|@gra, Som(a) Diet Pills Many Meds”, and is blacklisted by most DNSBL’s. Will copyright prevail and save the internet from Spam?
Finally got Net::DNS to compile and install on XP with Active Perl 5.8. Yea for me.
So I’m experimenting with DNSBL. Neat feature, seems to be working well. Still figuring out which lists are best (without slowing down mail to a halt).
Still can’t get sa-learn working properly. But that’s for tomorrow.
Less spam getting through. Much more than 95% effective now.