Blocking Spammers

Yesterday, D4D came under attack from a spammer using the name “Ebay Sniper”. They hit D4D with about 200 spam comments overnight, and they kept on trickling through during the day.

For whatever reason, Akismet was stopping them from displaying, but not blocking them completely. In addition, despite adding them to the discussion blacklist in the settings, the comments were still getting through.

So anyway, eventually I’d had enough of the crap, and ended up going to the big guns – blocking it by IP at source.  So the server now blocks everything from the IP address where all the spam was coming from (and it wasn’t an IP used by any of my normal readers, thankfully) and redirects it to www.fuck-off-spammer.com . I don’t know if that site exists – but if it doesn’t, it should.

Funnily enough, since I put the block in place I’ve had no spam comments at all. Go figure.