Friday, January 25, 2008
Is Today International Spam Day and Someone Didn't Tell Me?
Posted by Jason Dunn in "UPDATE" @ 05:07 PM
This morning around 9 am I checked in on this site and saw the "Recent Posts" section flooded with spam - 83 spam messages promoting a discount drug purchasing site, all by the same user (KeralasGoldendweller). I researched the IP address (85.255.117.226) and it traced back to an telco in the Ukraine (UkrTeleGroup Ltd.). I deleted all the spam, then started to block the entire IP range - but never finished because I was puzzled at the way phpBB was handling the block - I put in a ban for 85.255.117.*, and phpBB registered that as 85.*.117.* (maybe a smart networking person can explain if that makes sense). I figured I'd look into it later.
About 30 minutes ago I received a phone call from Jeff, one of our forum moderators, and he said he was going into a meeting but I should look at the site again. This time, there was 120 forum spam messages - all hard-core porn links. <sigh> The offending IP? Yup, you guessed it, the same range - just the part I didn't get around to banning yet. <double sigh> I deleted all the spam, and with Janak's help we've now banned the entire IP range from reaching our server.
So, with apologies to my pierogi-loving peeps in the Ukraine (I'm 1/4th Ukrainian myself, and I do love my pierogi!), we've had no choice but to ban a good chunk y'all from visiting us. When we move to our new vBulletin-based forum system (should be soon now), we have a much better system in place for stopping spam so I hope this is the last time I have to apologize for spam in our forums. ;-)
About 30 minutes ago I received a phone call from Jeff, one of our forum moderators, and he said he was going into a meeting but I should look at the site again. This time, there was 120 forum spam messages - all hard-core porn links. <sigh> The offending IP? Yup, you guessed it, the same range - just the part I didn't get around to banning yet. <double sigh> I deleted all the spam, and with Janak's help we've now banned the entire IP range from reaching our server.
So, with apologies to my pierogi-loving peeps in the Ukraine (I'm 1/4th Ukrainian myself, and I do love my pierogi!), we've had no choice but to ban a good chunk y'all from visiting us. When we move to our new vBulletin-based forum system (should be soon now), we have a much better system in place for stopping spam so I hope this is the last time I have to apologize for spam in our forums. ;-)
