Sat, 13 May 2006

Another Comment SPAM Attack

SPAMThese people just don't know when to quit: I got a note from my upstream provider that my server seemed to be having a real traffic spike last night. At 2am PDT. All of it from the web, on port 80, and all of it involving a Perl script.

This blog is the only thing running on my server that's 100% Perl.

Taking a gander at the logs they sent, I finally deduced the cause: a massive comment SPAM attack by a bunch of bots. All of which failed to post, due to my little bit of obfuscation. But the cumulative effect was that of a denial of service attack on the entire server.

So, once more, I've fudged the writeback scripting - now you won't even see a 'Post' button if JavaScript is not enabled in your browser. Not many bots have JavaScript engines. This should take care of it for a while.

But I have no doubt that this is not the last post I'll make about comment SPAM. Bastards.

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Notes: If you put a <mailto:> link in the URL field your address will not be mangled: this could be a bad idea as your email address could be easily harvested by bots designed for SPAM. The comments field should now format correctly for line feeds and carriage returns: when you hit the 'Enter' or 'Return' keys in your comment it should break to a new line. The text should wrap cleanly. Please let me know if it doesn't. No HTML tags will pass through - entering links seems to be the main cause of comment SPAM. Also, please be sure that Javascript is enabled in your browser before attempting to post a writeback. Sorry for any inconvenience, but this really helps cut down on the amount of comment SPAM I have to deal with.
 
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