More Anonymous Posts, Less Anonymous Spam
For the last year at the website we have only allowed registered members to post comments on pages/forum topics. We also do not display any advertisements to registered users – so once someone registers to post a comment, the only way to generate any income from that member is to convert them to a Premium Member. Since the conversion rate to Premium Membership is low, it seemed to me that my Kontera and Adsense earnings might be higher if I allowed anonymous users to post comments. Making it easier for anybody to post a comment would also mean more user-generated content for the GoogleBot to suck-up.
One of the benefits of only allowing registered and validated members to post comments is that we had a spam-rate of virtually zero. Sure, once in a while a crafty spammer would use a real email address and take the time to validate his membership and make a post, but our spam-filter would catch it anyway and it would never see the light of day. By opening up comments to anybody, I knew we would probably see a few more spam posts.
Well, I guess it doesn’t take a rocket-scientist to figure out that by allowing anyone to comment, you will get spammers – and we did.. 24 hours after opening up comments to anybody we went from getting a couple of spam-posts a week, to 50-100 per day. Since our trusty Drupal Spam Module was still catching 100% of these posts it was not a huge deal, but my moderators were beginning to complain.. I guess wading thru all those viagra, Cialis, baby-porn, shit-porn, donkey-porn and other posts that are too gross to mention was getting to be too much for them.
I started looking at the source of these spammers and realized that about 99% was coming from one ISP in Romania (wow, surprise, huh?). So by blocking two IP blocks from accessing the site, I’ve reduced the 100 or so spam comments per day down to 3 or 4. By blocking these address ranges i’m also preventing anyone else from that ISP in that part of the world from accessing the website, but this is a risk i’m willing to live with.
Offending Spammer’s IP Blocks:
These are the two blocks of IP’s that I’ve denied access to the site:
- 84.109.x.x
- 83.171.187.x
I blocked them by adding the IP blocks to my .HTACCESS file:
order allow,deny
deny from 84.109
deny from 83.171.187
allow from all
If you get a lot of spammers, it might be worth the time to see where they come from and block the entire IP range as I have. It’s easy to do and only takes a minute.
*This post was made after fighting a bad case of the flu for the last 4 days. Although I’m still buzzed on cold-medicine, Imodium, and Pepto-Bismol, I did my best to make it coherent.
Like
as long as comments aren’t closed, things are “a” ok
Skip the HTACCESS crap, they can still access your box, just not via http. Append an IP Tables rule and really stop ‘em in their tracks.
Maybe I’m just too paranoid
Nullamatix.com said:
I do that for the REALLY bad offenders, as well as for the guys that show up in my log trying to guess my root… It seems that I’m just trying to clear the beach one grain of sand at a time though…