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2
Jun
2006

This is getting ridiculous

flex

I’ve been away at an offsite to discuss the future of Flex and the “engagement platform”. Because of this, I’ve been away from the internet and unable to clean up the spam comments on this blog.

In the 24 hours that I’ve been away:

470 pieces of blog comment spam were caught by the spam filter.
13 pieces of blog comment spam made it through.
0 actual comments were posted (not surprising, since I haven’t posted in a while).

So I had to sift through 503 pieces of comment spam, knowing that I probably had 0 actual comments, which turned out to be true. Great. Thanks, spammers.

Does anyone want to start up a service to find spammers and annoy them? Say, 24 hours of crank calling their house? I’d pay good money for that.

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12 Responses to “This is getting ridiculous”

  1. nick tong (June 2nd, 2006 at 7:17 am)

    i once thought about setting up a site called ‘SpamThisGit.com’ that would spam/annoy the spammers – didn’t want the trouble with ISP though.

    Why not use captcha, or a click to confirm your comments page.

  2. FlashGen (June 2nd, 2006 at 7:20 am)

    I know exactly what you mean – If it wasn’t for Akismet I think I’d go mad with all the spam.

  3. William from Lagos (June 2nd, 2006 at 7:20 am)

    You should be using Captcha, at least!

  4. Sidney de Koning (June 2nd, 2006 at 7:28 am)

    Hi,

    Why not make a comment box in flash? That way spammers cant read out your form information?

    Simple solution to the problem :)

    Good luck,

    Sidney

  5. Glen (June 2nd, 2006 at 7:44 am)

    My domain name gets hammered every 2 weeks by the people advertising “broadcast your email address to 1,000’s”, etc.
    Every time I get annoyed by this, I fill in their online form with random details and test credit card numbers which tend to go through their badly engineered systems.
    I was contemplating writing a PHP script to do this automatically because their “CAPTCHA” implementation is not actually an image but is in HTML
    Never got round to it though – too scared! But I guess it is enough to keep them busy for a little while. Guess more people should do it – all the phishing scams are quite funny to fill in with rude random details too – although I don’t tend to click on the trackable links…

  6. Rick (June 2nd, 2006 at 8:04 am)

    Hi,
    Yep, I know what you mean. I’ve got a few sites running on the same blog engine I wrote and one in particular has been getting over 30 attempts (I’m currently successfully blocking them!) a day. Mostly from the one IP address which is a compromised server somewhere. I’ve emailed the hosting company via WHOIS details but it’s yet to be disabled!

    I came across a PHP script called “Bad Behaviour” which I’ve not tried yet but looks interesting:
    http://www.homelandstupidity.us/software/bad-behavior/
    It’s available for a few blog tools / cms but can be added to others fairly easily it seems.

    Cheers,

    Rick

  7. Ryan (June 2nd, 2006 at 8:44 am)

    >> I’ve emailed the hosting company via WHOIS details but it’s yet to be disabled!

    Of course not! Because the hosting company receives way too much spam to know what is and isn’t legit.

    Face it, we have a major problem. It is hard for small operators to run businesses on the web and keep up with their email because of all the spam and hacking attempts. We need a bit of viligantism and a back bone by ISPs to shut them down.

  8. Aral Balkan (June 2nd, 2006 at 9:37 am)

    Hey Sho, if you’re on WordPress, Bad Behavior and Kismet are invaluable. Bad Behavior catches nearly everything and Kismet the rest. Since I switched I’ve had one false positive. Highly recommended!

  9. sho (June 3rd, 2006 at 10:26 am)

    Ok. I’ve activated akismet and bad behavior. Let’s see if it helps. If that fails, I’ll add captcha. Thanks, everyone!

  10. Tunaranch (June 4th, 2006 at 8:29 pm)

    Well, Blue Security did manage to get some spammers to stop, thanks to their Blue Frog software. (Or was it all an elaborate hoax? I dunno.) But there is a project, called Black Frog, in the works, that aims to pick up where blue security left off. This is for email spam, though.

  11. .:: carlosrovira.com - RIA Development ::. » No más SPAM gracias a Bad Behavior (July 25th, 2006 at 11:56 am)

    […] Escrito por Carlos Rovira a las 8:57 pm en Flash – Por alguna razón que se me escapa, hace unos días los Spammers empezaron a colarme comentarios en este blog de una forma bastante…¿como decirlo?…cansina. Hasta ahora ese momento, el plugin Akismet, parecía lo único necesario para mantener a ralla el SPAM, teniendo que comprobar de vez en cuando los comentarios en moderación. Ahora, y gracias a Aral Balkan (por su comentario en el blog de Sho) al menos para mi, es necesario algo más potente. La solución se llama Bad Behavior, y es sencillamente impresionante. Conforme lo activas entras en un idílico mundo sin SPAM . […]

  12. Shelley Engel (March 31st, 2007 at 10:46 pm)

    did you do to Purdue University?

    Shelley

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