Somehow spammers have gotten it in to their tiny little heads that they need to try to flood TANcast with spam comments.
I know admins of real sites will scoff, but 6 months ago we were averaging about 20 spam comments per day. In October we averaged 120 per day before I turned reCAPTCHA on. It’s too soon to tell whether that made a difference, but I think we’re at least back to double-digits. Since it is still coming, though, I must conclude that either there is a way to post a comment without solving the CAPTCHAs (a flaw in the site or the plugin) or else these fucktards are actually solving them.
The thing is, Akismet catches pretty much every single piece of spam posted to the site, even without reCAPTCHA tossing up an extra step. I think I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve seen something slip through. There is simply no reason to spam us. Nobody will ever see their penis-enlargement come-ons except Tim, Noah, and me, and Noah’s penis is plenty big for all 3 of us.
On the flip-side, Akismet does occasionally flag a valid comment, so Tim tries (and, infrequently, I do as well) to scan the pile of spam for any ham that slipped in. That’s annoying when there’s 20 to check a day. It’s more like a job when the spam really starts to flood in.
My solution is 1-fold: From now on, if your IP address has posted multiple spam comments to TANcast, we’ll just block that IP address.
Forever.
Fuck you, that’s why.
I added the first 2 dozen IPs to our block list this evening, including an entire Class B subnet. An unsurprising number were located in Chinese-owned blocks. It’s probably the same lowlifes that killed my cat.
If I did this correctly, anyone trying to hit the site from any of these addresses should now get absolutely no response from our server. We’ll see if this helps.
If you’re suddenly unable to see the site from your home computer (presumably you’re reading this via RSS or on another machine), some piece of shit spammer fuck has pwned either you or someone on your ISP (and you inherited their IP address). Get your machine checked, then email me your IP when you know it’s not hosting a bot.
My address is easy to guess. Don’t try to spam it; Google has an excellent filter.
