Poke the Monkey

Well, my spam buddy has returned, hitting me again with one spam per minute. He’s got an impressive list of open proxies. Before work I ran a quick check and he’s got 34 more servers he’s using. I didn’t have time to ban the list, so comments are off for this morning.

I’m thinking that I might just start banning all traffic from open proxies period.

It’s pretty clear that MT 3.2’s built in spam tools, while good, are not enough to deal with these guys. MT is currently leaving about 1 in 10 of these comments in moderation instead of junking them, and letting about 1 in 50 through to the site. Now these are not bad numbers by any means, but when you’re getting spams once a minute, that’s a lot of e-mail notifications of comments in moderation, and about one spam getting through to the blog each hour.

Banning that list of IPs completely knocked the spammer out for almost 2 days. I’d love to be able to just ban the IPs for every comment in the junk queue, and maybe specify an expiration for that ban.

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