Well I finally got around to removing all the spam off my old websites, and I've disabled all the commenting. Awesome.

I also had some old contact forms that I was getting spam from too. These now have links to my main contact form.

My contact form also got a bit of an update, it now has akismet support.

I've noticed that the web server has been running slowly today.

Anyway I think I've found the problem. One of my old blogs sites is currently being spammed. Currently there are 3.3 million comments in the database!

EDIT: Problem fixed:

mysql> delete from comments WHERE id > 556;

Query OK, 3305122 rows affected (2 min 21.45 sec)

EDIT2: The spam has been coming from caravan.ru a Russian ISP (who's logo is very similar to optus' old one...).

Defensio is an anti-spam service very similar to Akismet, except that they provide in depth spam statistics for your website.

I've just written a basic Defensio plugin for Bluetrait 2 and am giving it a test.

It looks pretty cool!

damn, they were quick. I've disabled commenting.

I'll need to go and clear out the database tonight.

Sorry about the spam!

I think I've found the cause for Akismet not working as well as it should have.


The class I was using had a low timeout value; I've since increased this to 10 seconds, inline with the new Wordpress 2 plugin.


So hopefully that will improve the amount of spam being caught.

I'm testing out a new spam system I quickly wrote.


Hopefully now if you're either logged in or have posted before with the same email address your comment shouldn't be deleted.




I plan to add more tests (see post below) later.

Argh. Too much spam is getting through again; even with Akismet. So I'm in the process of writing a new spam class. The aim is to build a comment score (similar to email spam filtering programs) based on the following:

• Email Address/Name/Website


• Comment Body (number of links etc)


• If the user is registered


• If the user has successfully posted a comment before


• white and black lists


• response from akismet


• how old and how many comments a post has

So hopefully I can cut down the spam.

I found the following address in my logs. Looks like a spamming program. Feel free to try and take it offline.

http://serversinfo.org/VIP/master.php

EDIT: I've changed the message so it spams it own site, hopefully taking itself offline. The stop command didn't seem to work, so this is the next best thing.

EDIT2: Looks like the owner has password protected the area.

I've been getting a few akismet time outs lately which may be one of the reasons why some spam is making it on to this site. I should do a check against that.

Far too much spam on this site, I'm getting about 100 a day blocked by akismet, although a few are still getting through.


Anyway I've upped the spam level to maximum, meaning that anything detected as spam is not accepted (no comment moderation).




I do need to improve this still.