Spam Attacks
January 26, 2007
Mr Papa’s World is constantly under attack from spammers. Luckily, I have some pretty good tools in place to stop these idiots. I thought I would pass along some statistics from spam attacks and how effective my tools (I didn’t write them) have been at stopping them.
I run Akismet which attempts to stop comment spam. In the approximately 6 months that I have been running it, Akismet has block 6495 comment spam attempts to date. Most of these spam bots are attempting to post comments about drugs, gambling or sex things. You the reader of Mr Papa’s World see very little of this as its been very effective. Occasionally, a rare spam comment gets through. Every once in a while there is a false positive too. I still try to review all the spam caught by Akismet and make sure it really is spam.
Akismet is actually not kept very busy these days. About one month ago, I installed Bad Behavior to stop spam bots before they actually get to my site and use up bandwidth. It too has been effective and thus the spam bots are stopped before they ever even can make a spam comment for Akismet to catch. Bad Behavior is stopping approximately 15,000 spam attacks every 7 days.
Bad Behavior and Akismet have proven to be a very effective tool in stopping spam from Mr Papa’s World and not wasting bandwidth.
In addition to the spam comments, the spam bots have attempted to overpower the shoutbox on the right hand sidebar. The shoutbox includes some built in spam protection and to date has stopped 1306 spam bots from posting spam to the shoutbox.
I don’t know why the spam bots are after me, I cant be that popular a site. The situation is even much worse for high traffic site, where the spam comments each day can number in the ten thousands. I shall continue the fight against spam.
Another Site Update
January 12, 2007
It’s time to announce another site update. This one is pretty minor, but hopefully visitors to the site actually use it. I have update how Mr Papa’s World handles it’s archives of old posts.
In the sidebar, you will see a block that lists all the archive information that is available. You can search/peruse the archives by author, category, date or tags. I also have the polls archive available. After selecting how you want to browse the archives, you will be presented with list of items available under that archive type.
When you select the sub-type (ie author name, category name, month or tag), you will be presented with a list of posts that match that criteria. Each post will give you an excerpt of that entire post. This is where the fun begins. This is my first foray in the world of Ajax. Ajax is neat in that it allows you to add/change content on a page without reloading the entire page. In this case, if the excerpt interests you, click on the show entire post link and the excerpt will change to the entire post as if you had visited that particular post page.
You can hide posts that you have ajaxed or you can ajax open additional pages too. Hopefully, this new feature makes searching the archives easier and more user friendly. As always, comments and suggestions are welcome.
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