Hey, blog spammers. Having a hard time getting through? Finding you simply can’t connect in order to offer your valuable services? I can understand your disappointment. So many people who visit this site are in dire need of payday advance loans, sexual “enhancement” pills and endoscope systems. I can’t imagine how they’ll get by without your amazing offers.
Brief digression: Yes, the third item on that list was “endoscope systems”. In the past week there have been two attempts to spam my blog with advertisements for endoscopes. Or so they claimed. Perhaps “endoscope”, is a code word for something else. Personally, I think it would be an appropriate slang term for “blog spamming software”…
Back to the topic at hand: Blog spam. Yes, it’s the scourge of bloggers everywhere, but there are good ways of combating it. The brute force method is screening all comments before allowing them to be posted. That’s one method I use at the moment, but it will get prohibitively time consuming when blog traffic grows too large (ahem – yeah, right). But it provides useful data in the form of the IP addresses from which the spam emanates. You see, this blog is hosted on my own domain rather than on some cheesey service like Blogspot.com. This means I can make use of an option called “.htaccess”, a file which can be used to prevent any IP address I specify from even connecting to my web server, much less spamming it. So whenever some gene-pool excreta sends an advertisement for a Taiwanese pr0n site to my moderation queue, I add a setting that bans his IP address — usually all the IP addresses of his provider — from my site completely. Forever. So if traffic ever does get too great for me to moderate manually, I should be able to turn off moderation entirely and still be immune to 99% of these dipsticks.
The only drawback to this approach is that I don’t get the satisfaction of knowing when the server rejects one of these parasites. It’s like stepping on a cockroach without getting the satisfaction of hearing the crunch. But that’s a small price to pay.
So in parting, let me just say to all you blog spammers, “Puzzle Quest Review of Awesomeness seeks for a Clifton, it is smooth to receive”.
…and the horse you rode in on.
