geek ramblings >> Spammer Tar Pit: I like to call this the “PissOff” plugin. Dougal and I were discussing this yesterday while our respective weblogs were getting flooded with comments and he has come up with a really nice solution. This one stops flood spammers in their tracks. This plugin, used in conjunction with Kitten’s Spam Words will not only keep Spam from showing up on your blog, but will also prevent spam from even showing up on your moderation list.
Basically, Dougal’s plugin uses a powerful regex (regular expressions) to check the referer IPs of people accessing your blog. The list he uses is derived from your own blog by matching the IP format against the list of moderation keys that have been added to your blog. If anyone from the moderated IPs tries to access anything, they are bogged down for a minute and then send the “Access denied” message. I personally liked the “piss off spammer” message he had setup before.
Dougal had written something similar earlier yesterday and we came up with some further modifications, but the moderation keys along with the referer comparison really makes a difference. I can tell you for sure that this works and works well (for now). I will be adding a further few tweaks when I get a chance (moderation by the superglobal $_POST).
Thanks Dougal!
I personally think this is a dangerous route, because IP-blocking only works for a short time. Unless you flush your IP list from time to time, you could be blocking legitimate users.
I can see the desire to do it, though.
I agree with you, though this could be easy to turn on when getting flooded. This person almost took down my server yesterday. SpamDOS sucks. That gives me another idea.