I bet yer all dying to know how my "Hang The Wanker" game is going, so here's a swift update with Februarys results. These results only reflect a partial month though as the game didn't start until the 13^th : In total there were 2,212 wankers who decided to participate, making a total of 10,653 attempts to win the prize ...... they all failed ..... bitch huh? Of course the number one challenger was 81.177.14.26 who had 606 attempts before I decided to ban their arse from the server completely, a game's a game but this tit just takes the piss.

Whilst all this looks like just a bit of fun it does have a serious side. Every single one of these hits that have been stopped have been shown a "piss off you wanker" message which is about 140 characters in length. If they hadn't been stopped at the door then each one of them would have involved the whole of the evocore being loaded, several database hits whilst it struts it's stuff, and then the bandwidth of sending the page to a wanker ... all 50,123 characters of it. If you multiply those figures up, you have a bandwidth saving of 532,468,899 characters alone ( just over half a gig :| ). God knows how much cpu/mysql resources I've just saved as well.

Now I don't know about you lot, but personally I prefer to use that half a gig of bandwidth and the associated cpu and mysql resources to serve up my blog to the twisted few [i]that actually read it[/i]! .... wierd or what? Don't get me wrong, I have shedloads of bandwidth going idle, and the cpu is hardly breaking into a warm, never mind a sweat, as my blogs pretty much all on its lonesome on this box, but I begrudge wasting any server resources on spammers ..... unless it's to play games with them ;)

Anyway, I think it's time I wandered off and added some new rules to the game so that the spammers don't get bored ....
¥

Following up from my "hang the wanker" game I just thought I'd share some of the results. Out of the 1,500+ spam attempts I've received in the last 24 hours alone, one ip in particular was responsible for almost [b]80%[/b] of them and is the reason for this post. The ip in particular is [b]81.177.14.26[/b] and following a chat with Danny he found out that it was part of an ip block ( 81.177.14 / 81.177.15 ) for a russian host (no suprises there then).

From looking at the logs of various sites on a multitude of servers I was deeply dissapointed to discover that it wasn't me that was popular, this wanker hits every server we checked! So, the best advice I can give you is this. For those of you who run windows servers then I advise you hit IIS and ban the whole bloody lot of them ( you can find instructions here ). If you have a website hosted on a linux box then I'd advise that you add the following to your htaccess to stop this tit from wasting your bandwidth and cpu :-

order allow,deny
deny from 81.177.14.
deny from 81.177.15.
allow from all

¥

It's been a while since I last played with wankers ... I mean "spammers" .... they must be missing all the fun and games we used to have ....... so I decided to make up for it and play "hang the wanker". This novel little game starts by emptying your blacklist and then sitting back and just waiting for the contestants to arrive. Simple huh? The rules of the game are even simpler, there are none, after all it's pretty pointless having rules when you're playing games with someone who hasn't even got the basic intelligence to work out that people despise everything that they do.

Now, before you all go "ohhh this sounds like a cool game" and rush off to empty your own blacklists so that you can participate as well ..... DON'T :| ..... no, seriously don't .... unless you fancy deleting the thousands of spam that you'll receive because you didn't know the rules either!

¥

We finally launched the new Lycos Directory yesterday, how cool :D The website was coded by AstonishMe, we also coded the engine that drives the whole thing, and on top of all that, it's sitting on one of HappilyHosted's shiny new servers.

"So", I hear you ask, "what the hell has that got to do with spam?".......... EVERYTHING ....... if you visit the directory and scroll down, you'll see some insignifcant text that reads "Powered by Link Centre ®" ...... see it? ...... Guess what that means? I'll give you a clue, we control the sites that get into the LinkCentre ( ®, to keep Nick happy ;) ) listings ..... and we detest spammers.

Which means that all you sorry arse spammers out there that think it's great to shovel your shit down peoples necks will now be penalised by us, and Lycos .... ohhh, and every other site that we'll soon be providing listings for ......... bitch huh?

Don't say I didn't warn you not to spam my blog though huh?

¥

June statistics

Hover over the thumbnails to zoom in

Spam stats: Breakdown of spam by day

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

Spam stats: Breakdown of spam by hour

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

Hover over the thumbnails to zoom in

Spam stats: Breakdown of spam by day

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.

Spam stats: Breakdown of spam by hour

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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