Link over to Wired and see Paul Boutin's suggestions for 101 Ways to Save the Internet
1 Unleash vigilante justice on spammers One activist has proposed filters that launch distributed denial-of-service attacks back at spammers. Great. Just make sure we have the right addresses first.6 Triple our cable modem speed First step: Just turn off the Golf Channel and UPN.
7 Demand truth in advertising for software updates C'mon, AOL 9.0 is really AOL 8.0 with the version number increased 1.0.
8 Declare spammers are terrorists And put Ashcroft, Ridge, and Rumsfeld on their tails.
15 Stop the US Patent Office before they patent the hyperlink Oops, too late.
Let me publicly express my gratitude to Richard over at Edifying Spectacle for some much needed directions on my robots.txt file and for pointing me to DiveIntoMark's excellent link on how to stop spambots, spybots, and unwanted robots from stealing ridiculous amounts of bandwidth.
robots.txt has been modified, and I'm investigating and studying the .htaccess mods that Mark suggests.
UPDATE: I'd also like to thank Mizzouguy for his sharing of his .htaccess files and offers for detailed explanations.
Thanks guys!
An update on my comment spammer, the latest round:
After reporting each abuse attempt on my blog to the comment spammer's ISP, I received the following email this morning from optusnet.com.au's support department:
Dear Jeff,Thank you for your email.
Can you please confirm your GMT offset, so we are able to trace the source of this incident?
Kind Regards,
OptusNet Abuse Team
abuse@optusnet.com.au
http://www.optusnet.com.au
Telephone: 1300 301 325
Fax: 1800 501 491
So, maybe, just maybe, we'll have one less comment spammer to worry about for a while.
Sent the following note to blogger.com's admins a couple of days ago complaining about the amount of "referral spamming" that's being done by one site hosted there. I'll not mention the name here in order to deprive them the satisfaction of having their site show up (but it has something to do with a particular hotel chain heir).
on hundreds of occasions during the past month, I have been referral spammed by [insert-name-here].blogspot.com. This is blatant abuse intended to only increase their search engine ratings. daypop has already banned the site due to their referral spamming. I have denied all requests from [insert-name-here].blogspot.com (resolves to [insert IP here]) to my blog.My blog (clack.jethrotech.com) does not show up on
[insert-name-here].blogspot.com so the referral traffic is bogus. I have
been having a conversation with other bloggers the past couple of days
that have faced the same issue from [insert-name-here].blogspot.com.Here's an entry from my apache log file:
Host: [insert-ip-here] Url: /blogs/Clack/ Http Code : 200
Date: Dec 28 15:44:50 Http Version: HTTP/1.0" Size in Bytes: 52375
Referer: http://[insert-name-here].blogspot.com/ Agent: Mozilla/4.0
(compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.0)Help stop this form of spam.
and, not surprisingly, I received the following reply this morning (which, by the way, addresses absolutely nothing in my original email to blogger support):
Hello,Thank you for your note. Blogger is a provider of content creation tools,
not a mediator of that content. We allow our users to create blogs, but we
don't make any claims about the content of these pages. In cases where a
contact email address is listed on the page, we recommend working directly
with the author to have this information removed or changed.-Blogger Support