Getting Spammed Up Real Good Here
Posted in Personal Miscellany
on March 2nd, 2011 by
Stephen DeGrace
My reCaptcha defense for the comments on my articles is no longer working... either I'm getting targeted by spammers who use human beings in the third world to solve Captchas (in which case I guess it's a good thing their efforts are being wasted on my site, in a way), or else someone or someones have effectively broken reCaptcha and the reCaptcha people have not figured out a defense.
Either way, I need to change the way comments work on my site because I can't keep digging out like this. I tried blocking IP addresses from which spam seems to be coming with a simple middleware, but that no longer seems to be effective either, perhaps because the spammers (who appear to be in Russia) are using dynamically allocated IPs. I'll have to come up with a better solution tonight. Bottom line: I hate these fuckers, they ruin the Internet for everyone else.
UPDATE: I installed an IP-to-country database (actually, I loaded it into a table in the same database I use for Django, but I manually created the table and did not encapsulate it in a Django model) and created a middleware that examines all incoming requests and raises a 403 if the request appears to be coming from Russia. It's like a miracle, suddenly no more spam.
I actually am interested in people's opinion of fighting spam by blocking certain countries, though. Not saying anyone in Russia probably wants to read my site (although I have had at least one real private email from Russia on one of my Django articles), but is it OK to block people from certain countries from accessing your content because other people from their country are above-average Internet abusers?
I may later refine my blocker to only block comments and user registration. But as long as it's working, I think that I'm going to keep using country blocking. It's an obvious way to cut way back on spam without unduly inconveniencing myself or anyone else who wants to use my site.
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On March 6th, 2011
Stephen DeGrace
wrote:
I changed it to prevent anyone from Russia from posting a comment unless they are logged in, and to forbid automatic user registration from Russia. Content can be read normally. If in theory I manually set up an account for someone accessing the site from a Russian IP address, they would be able to log in and post comments normally.
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On March 5th, 2011 Stephen DeGrace wrote:
This is a test posting a comment while not logged in - RU is blocked.