Today, being on vacation and with little fun stuff to do, I decided to have a look at my old blog spam problem. Lately, I had been using a poor-man's spam cleaner for the comment spams, consisting on combining find, grep with an always growing list of forbidden patterns, and rm. This worked well for some time, and the spam problem was a minor annoyance now: I just had to check for non-removed entries every now and then and add those patterns to the regexp.

Yesterday I found out I had something like 3.000 new comments, so I thought my cheap system was broken and it hadn't deleted anything in many days. Nope, it was working correctly according to the logs, but everytime it ran it deleted something like 100 files or so. After adding the missing patterns and deleting the thousands of new files, I observed my webserver logs with tail -f for a moment and found I was getting one new comment every two seconds or so. WTF?! Are they generally getting this aggresive everywhere, or is this dude just pissed about my site? I hope the mail to the corresponding abuse@ address works.

As they submitted them quicker than the slow CPU could delete them, I removed comments temporarily, and looked at installing PyBlosxom 1.2, as people had told me there's improvements against spam in this release.

This site is now running 1.2, but I see nothing spam-oriented in the new comments plugin. Does anyone know what the Nice Way of blocking spam in PyBlosxom is, that is not too expensive CPU-wise? Comments should be working right now.

On another note, the site is crawling today because of the two triathlon pics I posted earlier, which are making people hit MaxClients quite fast.