No blogging this Christmas.
200+ spam comments per day took forever to clean up via the dial up connection I had during my (too short) vacation. The anti spam features I added to my blog last spring worked like a charm until I went away (Murphy's law). Very few, if any, spam posts made it through the system. Then the MT blacklist was taken off the air and I was left my backup solution based on regular expressions. It worked, but the system was only as good as the list of expressions used to validate post. Normally it was not a problem as I updated the list ASAP. The spammers changed tactics during Christmas; instead of one burst per day which I managed to handle, they started spamming a 24 hours a day.
I am back and I have blocked them, hopefully for good. The first thing I will do next year.... is to update my anti spam system so I can manage it from remote. I will blog my updated version when I have tuned it properly. It has a tarpit feature that slows down spammers but it also ties up valuable resources. Time will tell if it is a pain or a gain.
Enough whining. Back to my regular programming next week.
A Happy New Year to you all!
Feel free to drop a few cents in the
tip jar if this post saved you time and money