GregHowley.com

The Ongoing Battle Against Spam

December 4, 2006 - -

One good thing about having completely coded my own site is that I can constantly tweak my spam filters. As you may have noticed, I'm always manually deleting the crap, which is a royal pain, but after a while I get a feel for what kind of spam is going up, and I can modify the code to block things accordingly. I've even used temporary filters to block comment spam that seems to be part of a trend, and then a week or a month later I'll stop blocking what amounts to an innocuous, if seldom-used phrase.

I apologise to any commenters who may have tried to make legitimate comments about online casinos only to be blocked by the filters I've written, but they help a lot. Likewise, I've had to disable commenting on all but the ten most recent blog entries - the Farscape post I'd made two years ago was for some reason getting spam comments on a daily basis, and I couldn't keep up with deleting it all.

For a while, I was also getting a decent amount of spam through my contact form. Guess the spambots started submitting forms. But I moved the filter code over there too and now I get none.

Things are managable right now, but I've noticed that at times, the amount of comment spam I get suddenly skyrockets. Good thing I'm diligent about quickly deleting it.