automated whack-a-troll
My website has been attracting a lot of page requests recently... to the point where my account was periodically crashing the shared server it inhabits back at DreamHost. Kind of amusing, I know, but also a Very Bad Thing (TM). Part of the problem was that the Googlebot spiders were getting lost in my domain, and page-requesting far too many times than was healthy for anyone, and the root of that problem seems to be a defective wiki install over at the TDZK Wiki I maintain. The solution to that is simple - block the Googlebots from the webpage. I suppose I could fix it, but I honestly do not know how, and do not care enough to try at the moment (after all, the game is defunct, and the wiki has not really been used in almost a year now).
However, another part of the problem is spam, and a whole frakking lot of it - my webpage receives between 1000 and 3000 trackback spams on a daily basis. Or, at least, it did.
See, the nifty new TypePad Anti-Spam I installed on my weblog was doing a fantastic job identifying spam trackbacks and filing them accordingly... but those trackbacks still get through to my server, count as a page request, and count towards the sum total of my webpage breaking things. Not good. So I have decided to augment it by reactivating MTAutoBan.
What that little plugin does is takes the IP addresses of anything marked as "spam", and then adds a "deny:" line to my webpage's .htaccess file for that IP. And now to interpret the technobabble - it takes the IP address, the unique identifier for any computer connected to the computer, and basically tells my webpage's server to not show that IP address anything. If that computer were to try and visit my site again, or trackback spam it again, or anything relating to my site, it would be confronted with a straight-up 404 error. Alternatively, I can sand-trap them (send them to a "go away" page), but I like the simplicity of a straight up 404 - yeah, it clogs up my error logs, but that almost gives me a warm fuzzy.
What does this mean to you? Well, if it has already affected you, you are pretty much out of luck anywise. But if, one day, you come to visit this site and it behaves like it is completely broken, unresponsive, or just gone, it means a comment or trackback from you mistakenly got filed as spam (the system does its own little automatic discrimination), and thus you are now banned. Drop me an email at "linoge - at - wallsofthecity.net" and I will do what I can to fix it (which actually is not that hard).
I really, really, really hate spammers. Curl up and die already.
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i am simon jester
legalese
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