Another Step Against the Spammers

Saturday, August 13, 2005, at 05:22PM

By Eric Richardson

So the spam killer hit a little snag today when the comment spammers started making the request for the blog post and the comment come from different IP addresses, and the initial request not come with a referer. So I'm still blocking lots of referer spam, which is nice, but some comment spam came back.

Then I realized that all of the IPs I was seeing were actually open proxies. So I started looking them up on DSBL, and they were there.

Normally I'm all for anonymous proxies, but in this case I hate comment spam more than I care about people having to hide from the government to browse this blog, So I added a DSBL IP check to my blocking mechanism. I have it in the same PerlPostReadRequestHandler still, but you could block based on IP even earlier, so I might break it out and do it there. Now I just need to start grabbing the DSBL zone to secondary so that I can have a local lookup.