I have officially declared war on guestbook spammers. It seems that every schmuck on the internet wants to use the guestbook on my band's website for free advertising. Fortunately, I coded the guestbook myself, so it is completely within my power to do something about them. A few months ago, I set up a simple but effective system for blocking spam.
The system is simple: There's a box on the sign guestbook page where you need to enter the name of the band (which doesn't appear on the page anywhere, even in the code). If you don't enter it correctly, it won't allow you to sign the guestbook. As of November 16, 2006 (when I started logging the attempts to sign the guestbook), there have been 1315 spam attempts, and not a single one has gotten through. Also, not one legit post has been blocked.
On the admin page I set up for the website (it allows other band members to post news and show dates, etc, without knowing any html), I can view the log of all attempts to sign the guestbook sorted by ip address. I noticed that some ip addresses appear over and over again.
A view of the log:
My latest weapon against the spammers has been to set up IP address blocking. Now when I look through the log and find an IP address that's been using up our bandwidth by repeatedly attempting to spam our guestbook, I can block the IP address, and the spammers are blocked from even bringing up the sign guestbook form.
I just thought I would share my victory against spam, since forums seem to be another one of their favorite targets.
The system is simple: There's a box on the sign guestbook page where you need to enter the name of the band (which doesn't appear on the page anywhere, even in the code). If you don't enter it correctly, it won't allow you to sign the guestbook. As of November 16, 2006 (when I started logging the attempts to sign the guestbook), there have been 1315 spam attempts, and not a single one has gotten through. Also, not one legit post has been blocked.
On the admin page I set up for the website (it allows other band members to post news and show dates, etc, without knowing any html), I can view the log of all attempts to sign the guestbook sorted by ip address. I noticed that some ip addresses appear over and over again.
A view of the log:
My latest weapon against the spammers has been to set up IP address blocking. Now when I look through the log and find an IP address that's been using up our bandwidth by repeatedly attempting to spam our guestbook, I can block the IP address, and the spammers are blocked from even bringing up the sign guestbook form.
I just thought I would share my victory against spam, since forums seem to be another one of their favorite targets.
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