June statistics

June statistics

Hover over the thumbnails to zoom in

Damn the spammers were out in force in June. In total we had over 51,400 spam attempts on our blogs which were pushing 102 urls. One of their new tricks is to spam you with search engine results links, as nobody is going to blacklist Yahoo right? The good news is that only 2 of their spamming garbage got past the spam hound (0.003% failure rate) and into the moderation queue :D

The busiest day of the week by far was Fridays ( 8,727 ) followed closely by Thursdays ( 7,857 ) and Tuesdays ( 7,549 ). They did most of their spamming between 5am -> 6am ( 2,627) and 12am -> 1pm ( 2,571 ).

At the moment the SpamHound allows these arses to waste my servers resources by sending them the whole page, but I'm in the middle of recoding it for (the much promised) 1.8 version of Phoenix. Once it's recoded I'll be keeping stats on how many of these arses I can stop at the door with minimal bandwidth/cpu overheads.

The lengths that they go to, to bypass any anti-spam measures that are in place really should tell these wankers that their crap REALLY ISN'T WANTED, but all they care about is getting links to their garbage so that they can make money. What sort of mentality is that?

As usual the urls that they spammed us with are full of a shedload of drug names, maybe we should look at combining the blacklist with a medical directory of drugs? They're also continuing their trend of spamming with bogus urls, probably trying to work out how to get past various anti-spam measures.

If you run a b2evo blog then I'd advise that you check that all of the following urls are in your blacklist (apart from the yahoo one, which is the search results url I mentioned, it doesn't affect the SpamHound because it doesn't rely on just a url to mark a comment as spam). You might also want to implement the hack mentioned in this post on the forums as it would have stopped over 7,500 spam all on it's own.

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May statistics

May statistics

Hover over the thumbnails to zoom in

Well, if I thought April was busy, then May was very busy! In total our blogs received 33,261 spam comments during the month, and the total would have been even higher if they hadn't been offline for the best part of a day at the beginning of the month. These comments were pushing 47 spam urls, which is an average of 707 comments per url. The SpamHound did very well this month, there were only 8 spam comments that weren't picked up automatically, which is a failure rate of less than 0.02% :D Although most of these could have been avoided if I'd manually added the spammer the first time they got past, I want to see how well the SpamHound can do with no manual intervention.

The busiest days of the week for spam this month were Sundays (5,722 in total) and Fridays (5,589 in total), and they seem to do most of their spamming between 9am -> 10am (1,686 in total) and 7am -> 8am (1,643 in total). Apart from a lull near the beginning of the month, which was due to the blogs being offline for a while, there was a fairly steady increase from the start to the end of the month. This would suggest that spammers have "monthly campaigns" and spend the start of the month rushing round creating new domains to spam us with.

My top tip for this month is to add [b]pizdetc[/b] to your antispam blacklists. This single word would have stopped over 22,000 spam comments all on its own!

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Introduction

I'd like to touch upon the subject of attitudes and methods, when it comes to coding, that are rife amongst amateur coders ... usually the sort that call themselves a "webmaster". They get on the big wide web, and it's full of bells and whistles and new toys, and they just want to have them all. So they produce a website using tables (when it'd be far easier and bandwidth friendly to use divs), they have flash buttons (to achieve a rollover effect that could be achieved with css), they use javascript effects (quite a few of which can be reproduced with just css), they also tend to produce fixed width sites (because they're easier) and usually their site only works in IE6 (although a few hours with a validator could cure most of that).

Ok, I might sound like a bitch, but let me tell you why I find all of the above appalling.

Keywords : [keys][webmaster] [xhtml] [css] [cross-browser] [wai] [javascript][/keys]

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Well bugger me!!!! I'm actually in the top 500 for Pond Pumps in Google(uk) ...... mind you, the total results have dropped to back 1,500,000 (looks like google have severely prunned their database) ...... but that still means that I'm in the top 0.03333333333% (ish) of the results ....... hmmmmm, maybe I should start selling them?

Once again, if you're a confused visitor that's landed on my tacky pad looking for somewhere to buy a pond pump you might prefer to visit this online aquatics shop where they actually sell them ;) ..... In the meantime I'm just gonna quietly get on with my world dommination of the google results.

My mates gonna be pissed ..... he'll pretend that he's not of course, and he'll point out the fact that I'm only in the top 500 ...... but he'll still be pissed . Of course, I could have attempted to speed up the process by being just as anal about "keyword frequency" and "word weight" and other technical stuff like that, but hell, the suns out and who has time for such stuff?

It does show some of the power of a blog to affect a search engines rankings though, you should see how many hits I get from people searching for pond pumps ....... mind you, the hits I get from the less endowed looking for a totally different type of pump is head to head for highest position ...... so to speak :|

Anyway, I'm off for a beer to celebrate.

¥

Keywords : [keys][pond pumps] [google] [mate] [pissed][/keys]

Birth of the SpamHound

SpamHound is born

[b2evo] (which is the blog software we use) comes complete with it's own [b]antispam blacklist[/b], which is basically a list of urls that have been reported as spammers by multiple blog users. Sounds great huh? ...... Well, it kind of is ...... right up to the moment where you want to include one of the "spam" urls in one of your posts ...... and you get called a spammer!!!!

The current antispam blacklist has about 4,400 spam urls listed, many of which have to be obsolete by now, and every hit on a page is checked against it. All comments left, by memebers and visitors alike, are checked against the same list. This all adds up to a lot of unneccesary overheads for the poor old server cpu.

With this in mind I decided to see how effective the blacklist is, and just how many of the urls are actually needed. So, I implemented a comment moderation system for visitors and the emptied the blacklist ....... After deleting several thousand (moderated) spam comments I decided that this wasn't the way forward! The bright side was, I had a shedload of spam comments that I could analyse for common trends.

At the start of March I decided that I was ready for round two, so once again I dropped all of the antispam urls in the blacklist, this time however, I had the SpamHound to protect the blogs. Any comments that the SpamHound munches are automatically added to a seperate table so that the data can be further analysed, and any that get through enter a comment moderation process.

To date the SpamHound has munched over 26,000 spam comments and less than a dozen have managed to get as far as the moderation process!

Keywords : [keys][SpamHound] [SpamStats][/keys]

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Only Scott can sum up a (long ....... verrrrrrry long ...... way beyond the "grey hairs and great great great great great grandchildren" era ...... hell, he's 48, that's bloody ancient!!!!) lifetimes worth of experience as :-

[quote] that's the great thing about being a guy, rocks off == rocks off (quality either way) [/quote]

?

Keywords : [keys][scott] [love] [ancient] [/keys]