Hi Guys, My Typo blog has been so heavily spammed of late that my hosting provider took it off the air. I only convinced them to reinstate it after getting them to block the IP address ranges that were responsible for the bulk of the spam.
The problem was excessive CPU and database usage. I have a shared hosting plan and it was, according to the hosting provider, "creating a 30-50% spike in CPU usage for a period of 10-40 seconds". So even though i had the Akismet spam detection active, and it was quite effective at marking incoming comments as suspected spam, it was the database hit that killed me. Some questions: 1. Does the RBL prevent the comment from going into the database in the first place? If the incoming spam were blocked by the RBL, would it have been an effective alternative to blocking the incoming connections with Apache configuration (which I don't have control over)? 2. Does it make sense to contribute the spammer's IP addresses back to an RBL? If so, how could this be done? 3. Can I do anything to help speed up the redevelopment of spam protection measures? I'm on double-secret probation with the hosting provider, and need to get some better protection in place (the IP block isn't going to hold them for long, dammit). 4. I thought I read somewhere (perhaps on this list) where someone had done an analysis of the amount of database traffic that resulted from a single comment, and that it was currently way too high. Does anyone else recall this? Is there any point analyzing this further? Thanks, _______________________________________________ Typo-list mailing list [email protected] http://rubyforge.org/mailman/listinfo/typo-list
