EVula's Blog

Herein are recounted the epic travails of EVula, Slayer of Spam

If you'll recall, I recently celebrated the liberation of blog.evula.net from the oppressive regime of comment spam. My primary method of elimination was to close up older blogs and posts from comments, which has worked wonders; spam has taken a significant drop since then.

However, the adversary of ping spam was still a very vivid specter on the horizon. It was confined to a single blog (Audiophile's), and while this meant the struggle lacked the intensity of the comment spam battle, it was still rigorous, by which I of course mean mind-numbingly dull and tedious.

Audiophile has 194 entries; I manually closed each and every one of them, unchecking the "Allow pings" box at the same time. With that mighty feat completed (use a loose definition for "mighty". Use a loose definition for "feat," while you're at it), it was a simple matter of running the Blacklist over the pings. I've long since given up adding those URLs to the blacklist proper; it's far easier to just tell it to look for all pings and delete them en masse (as Audiophile and myself were the only two people to ever use pings, there was no danger in deleting anything worthwhile).

With the bastard scourge of Ping Spam obliterated, blog.evula.net is now, officially, 100% free of spam URLs in any way, shape, or form. Even if I fail to check the Blacklist every day, there are a fraction of available topics for bots to use, which means that spam attacks are (a) much smaller, and (b) much more concentrated, making it easier to delete.

(I like this entry's current title much better than my original one of "double-win". Much grander.)

Posted by Eric at April 9, 2006 02:00 PM