I have never understood why so many people use SPAM to generate revenues. I mean they have to be making money, or there numbers would be a lot less than they are. I mean how many people really would buy their medication from some outfit that sends you spam, offering you various pills, at cheap prices?
Makes no sense to me, how stupid people either are, or gullible, to actually believe that the Rolex knock off will fool anyone, or keep time for that matter. Yet they do, and in return our sites (blogs) are inundated with the shit.
I don’t know how many spam actually makes it through, but I sometimes think we are losing the war against it, just like we are losing so many wars, these days.
Now one of my sites, my video review site, has gotten a fair number of spam, which Akismet has blocked. But you know, saying that, it still makes me wonder, why they keep on coming. For a bit, I got about a hundred spam notices, each day, until I began to use “htaccess” to block the offending IPs.
Which brings me up to Akismet and to the other anti spam battlers. I mean, obviously they have a method to determine spam, and are able to isolate it from entering the blog, or the comment fields, but it ends there. I mean why can’t they generate a snippet of code, to either add automatically to one’s htaccess file, or to provide the necessary information, so we can add the list to it?
If it was automated, a lot of people who rarely consider these things, would have protection, but more than that, it would further thwart the efforts of these assholes, who send out this shit. However, in the meantime we have to “mine” the data ourselves, then figure out the correct code to use, and then upload and all that lovely stuff.
Also one reason why your htaccess should always be chmod to 644. Making it writeable, defeats the whole purpose because it seems the spammers, are pretty adapt at figuring that out, and I don’t know, sure don’t want them to remove my blocking abilities, or worse.
Then too, there is this whole IP address stuff. I mean hosts are limited to the block of IP addresses they can assign to accounts, and there is even talk that we are going to run out of appropriate IP addresses, and yet these spammers always seem to have a whole whack of IP’s from which to launch their attacks on our sites. I don’t get it, how the hell do they get so many IP’s while the honest working stiff is limited?
TIP : As I said, I use HTACCESS to deny access to the IP’s from the spammers, and it does work, but it is a pain to set up. However, if you mine the IP’s and put them in an Excel Worksheet, you can then use an htaccess generator, to create the necessary code.
A really simple htaccess generator, that provides the code, can be found HERE.
All you need is the offending IP’s then add that to your htaccess file, upload, and there you go. You have some protection, until the next wave comes along, when you’ll have to add more IP’s to the one’s you are already blocking. That is the annoying thing of all this, it just never ends.
Apr 09th by Malcontent