Cheap labor
by Volker Weber
This is the latest comment spam fad:
Post a positive, but empty comment, trying to scoop up some Google juice. Usually done with cheap labor, in this case from the Ukraine:
Last login: Wed Oct 11 09:06:45 on ttyp1
Welcome to Darwin!
Raven:~ vowe$ whois 82.207.51.35
...
inetnum: 82.207.50.0 - 82.207.51.255
netname: UKRTELNET
Since I do not want to deal with those spammers again, I am excluding their ISP from access to the site:
RewriteCond %{REMOTE_ADDR} ^82\.207\.5[0-1]\. [OR]
I had a much larger network just this morning. 6 Class-B networks:
RewriteCond %{REMOTE_ADDR} ^218\.1[3-8]\. [OR]
That is almost 100 million IP-addresses. Goodbye, Chinanet Guangdong province network.
Comments
Too bad that they now can't read your good bye message anymore :-)
Better to let 'em read and do the check on the comment post.
They can. If they would come back they would get an access denied. But they never check.
Could u base the display of the comment option based on the network? This way people in exotic places can read your blog but won't spam it.
Just a thought.
:-) stw
Well, I could for instance let them fill out the comment form and then decline to accept their comment. But I'd rather keep those crooks and their spiders completely off my site.
How about an endless captcha loop? It should of course produce statistics on how many times they try on average.
Which part of "off my site" is hard to understand? :-)
I don't think it's hard to understand. Consider server bandwidth as a scarce resource. Then you simply want to use it in the best possible way which in this case means reaching the users which really are interested in the content of the site. Such as me. Thanks!
Holy ****!! I hope no-one will ever spam you from my ISP!!!
Giuseppe, unless you move to China or Eastern Europe, you are safe. ;-)
For a case in point re spammers killing a site's bandwidth, talk to Colin Williams. I would provide a permalink to the post in question on his site, but there's no search or archive! So, here's the cached page:
Look for 'Comment spam bites hard'
It is "Ukraine", not "the Ukraine"
Obviously you have not been there.
I keep repeating myself, but I find that it works so very well... Akismet would do the trick nicely as well - since I've installed it I've had exactly one spam coming through (not that I get enormous amounts of spam).
There's a movable type plugin as well -> http://akismet.com/development/
(I'll stop making remarks about this before vowe thinks I'm spamming him with Akismet adverts... :-) )
Well, this is what got me worried. Labor is also cheap in Indonesia, India, Malaysia etc. And this are the places I read your blog from... So just not showing the comment section for banned subnets should remedy the problem without loosing your exotic (real) readers.
;-) stw
Sam Hill told you!
Clearly you have to visit a nation before you are qualified to (a) mention it in a post and (b) ban it from your site.
PS When did Ukraine drop the "the"? And why?
"The" was dropped when the country became an independent nation instead of a subjugated region of the Soviet Union. To Ukrainians, referring to "the Ukraine" shows insensitivity to their hard won struggle and liberation from the USSR. It demonstrates cultural ignorance and (perhaps) arrogance.
Thanks for clarifying Sam. I assure you, it’s ignorance on my part, not arrogance ;o)
Puhhhh, that was close.
I live in Guandong Province, but apparently my provider is not Chinanet. I dont know what provider I have, but now I am afraid that my one will be the next.
PLEASE DONT LOCK ME OUT!
=)
