Web

I’m now getting 20 or more spams a day at my gmail address. At least Gmail’s spam filters catch all of them. When one of my addresses gets too much spam, I usually abandon it. I took advantage of my spare invites to give myself another gmail account.

Today I found 5 spams in my new account, which I never publicized anywhere. The name is long, a bit unusual (the combination of two names) and shouldn’t be found with a dictionary attack. If I’m going to get spam there, I might as well stick with my old gmail address since everyone knows it, I have all of my labels and filters set up nicely, and it’s easier than updating everyplace I signed up with it. My new address is now forwarding and only a few friends know it.

WorldBeatPlanet and MacMegasite are getting hit pretty hard with comment spam. It looks like the spammers are randomly hitting articles with a low node number. To prevent it, I disabled comments on both sites for all but the most recent articles. I now see that my log is filled with errors like:

	Comment: unauthorized comment submitted or comment submitted to a closed node online roulette.

I also added an input filter which prevents anonymous users from posting links in their comments.

I just got a nice Christmas present from DreamHost – they tripled the bandwidth for all accounts. I now have 192GB/month.

I’ve had ads in MacMegasite’s RSS feed for a few weeks, and today I tried a different ad service as a test. When I made the change, I got two complaints from people who said they’re unsubscribing from the feed because of the ads.

Right now I’m paying $20/month to host all of my websites. The money is coming from my own pocket. I’d like to have my sites at least make enough to pay for themselves. Since a large percentage of my visitors at MacMegasite read the RSS feed, it means they miss the ads on the page. Having ads in the RSS feed would help pay for it.

As an alternative, I’ve switched to a truncated summary telling the user to visit the site to read the whole article.

MacMegasite just got hit with 6 more comment spams of the same type I’ve been seeing recently. This time the spam plugin caught them before they got posted. I banned yet another IP address block owned by China Telecom, 61.140.0.0 – 61.147.255.255. If this keeps up, I’ll have all of China Telecom banned.

I just got the following phishing email at my gmail account:

Dear eBay Customer,

This email is a reminder that your eBay account information suspended. To avoid any interruption to your service including the ability to log onto eBay account, please update your credit or debit card information by clicking here and submitting our form.

If you do not update your credit or debit card information you may no longer be able to use eBay and associated services.

I don’t use my gmail address at eBay and I’ve never provided that address to them. At least the scammers should know to use the right email address. I’ve never once seen one of those emails sent to an address I actually use for the service they claim to be.

Update: It gets even better. I just got another one, this time with multiple email addresses shown for the recipients. Can they get any more obvious and are people really stupid enough to fall for it?

Since I switched MacMegasite’s RSS feed to FeedBurner, I find that my bandwidth usage has been dramatically reduced. One person has complained about the ads in the feed, though. I’m considering some kind of add-free feed for a paid subscription (which would also remove ads from the main page), but I haven’t figured out how to do it. I would probably require a login for the feed, which some news readers still may not support and there doesn’t seem to be an easy way to do it with Drupal.

I just got hit with the same comment spam at both macmegasite and worldbeatplanet. Two spams were posted at each site, with a subject something like ‘sdsf’ and the content consisting entirely of Chinese characters. All of the ones I saw today came from the IP address 218.17.119.154. Last week I saw exactly the same spam, which came from IP address 218.18.14.120.

Both of those belong to China Telecom. To avoid any future spam, I’ve blocked their entire IP address range from 218.13.0.0.0 through 218.18.255.255. I’ve never seen a legitimate user at either site from there, only spammers.

The comment spammer that hit me Thursday is back. Since then I added a patch which rejects comments containing certain strings before it even gets held for moderation. I just added a few patterns from his latest spam, so he’ll be gone soon. As soon as I get any spam, I add any unique strings from it to my filter and they’re gone for good.

Update: I converted my patch to a plugin. In the short time it took me to remove the hack and install the plugin, he managed to get in another spam. In addition to the plugin, I added some code to my .htaccess to deny all requests from the particular software he’s using.

Update #2: This spammer is mentioned in the WordPress forums. It looks like a lot of WP blogs are getting hit.