I don’t usually have to deal with too much in the way of spam comments, as the Akismet plug-in seems to catch the majority of them for me. The last 24 hours has seen a lot of almost-believable comments that might have been approved, except they are copies of half-a-dozen originals, from similar IP addresses:
“Just wanted to let you know the sidebar looks off in my browser with 1600×1200 resolution.”
“Hey, I haven’t checked in here for a while, but I will put you on my bloglist so I don’t forget to check back.”
“I don’t always agree with your posts, but this was dead on, way to go!”
“Oooh, you’re such an inspiration. I love this blog!”
“Hmm. I am not so sure about that…”
Also amusing is that the posts are recorded as coming from places like “cat.com”, “dog.com”, “strawberry.com”, and “chocolate.com”. I’m assuming they’re all from the same botnet (most are from the 173.234.x.x block and report emails at ymail.com).
Just block everything from 173.208 and 173.234. They have hundreds of subnets and it’s not worth straining at gnats. The AVH First Defense Against Spam plugin is superb at filtering out junk before it even gets to Akismet.
Comment by Chris Taylor — December 22, 2010 @ 09:29
Hmm. I am not so sure about that…
Comment by Lickmuffin — December 22, 2010 @ 13:58
BANNINATED
There, got another one!
Damned things are as persistent as cockroaches.
Comment by Nicholas — December 22, 2010 @ 15:37
If you want to be super punctilious and only block the most likely offenders, some helpful spammers have created a list of available proxies. Guess which subnets feature prominently.
But as I said, I find it easier to just block all the 173.208s and 173.234s.
Comment by Chris Taylor — December 22, 2010 @ 18:54