fighting spam
so i came across an interesting spam issue this week over on the frames' website. We have a really simple stats tool that works out who spends the most time on the message board (based on # of posts) - some people really do no work at all! on monday (01 Jan) I noticed that the top 7 or 8 or had spam type names (vigra@online, etc) which tweaked my interest. so after a bit of investigation, i found that one particular url had made it into a spammer's attack vector list - getting hit multiple times in one day (over 1600 spam replies to the thread). my initial inclination was to block the IPs previously used (no joy! these spammers are no doubt using open proxies / infected machines). next step was to implement some sort of lookup on the IPs posting - i checked a random sampling of the IPs against email blacklist and lo-and-behold they were mostly listed on email blacklists too. bingo - check IPs against blacklists before accepting the post. so now all attempts to post to the fram