Saturday night, my page got hit with eight spam messages that got through the filtering system. So I did what I usually do and went into the backend to delete them then turn on the captcha for each of my recent posts to prevent more getting through. That pretty much fixes it, for the most part, but sometimes much older posts without the captchas get hit so I have to go digging around to find them, but in general, the captchas do a lot of good once they’re turned on. Sunday night, Ian’s page got hit with about ten spam posts that got through the filtering system, so yesterday morning he had a bunch of crap comments to delete. That was when he decided to mess with our system to try and come up with additional spam-blocking measures to see if he couldn’t prevent spam attacks like this weekend.

Mind you, Ian’s spam blocking already does a world of good. Out of all the spam that attacks our sites, only about three or four percent actually manage to make it onto the pages, and then once the captcha are on (those silly boxes with numbers and letters you have to copy to post), that three or four percent get blocked until there are more posts without captchas added to the page. What he does is really already quite effective, and there are just spurts of mass attacks like this weekend. And, well, like yesterday and today too.

See, in the process of trying to make the spam blocking better, Ian has found some new software, gotten some new tricks, and has altered the way spam blocking works on the Rantfest sites. All of this means that while he was working on changing the code, the spam blockers in place were off-line and we got hit by a lot of spam while he was working with it and are going to keep getting spam until the new system has all its bugs worked out. When I got up this morning, I had fourteen spam comments to delete. Most were on the posts from the past month, but a couple went back to posts from the beginning of the year. Madness. I don’t even want to think about how many Ian’s going to have to delete from his page once he wakes up.

So I guess the point of all this rambling is that the page isn’t going to be quite right for a little while. I personally use the “New Rant Posts” section under the menu bar to the left to see which posts have been recently updated, but because the spam comments cause that to refresh every time they hit, it’s not going to accurately show when a person updates and adds a new comment. Now I’ve resorted to using it to tell which older posts are getting spammed. It’s frustrating, but Ian’s working on it. And while he’s working on that, I’m going to keep working on my novels. I just drew a castle last night that I need to trace in marker so it’ll scan better then I need to start drawing interior rooms. After that comes another castle and probably an arena. All my architectural playing will be punctuated by deleting spam posts… *Sigh.* C’est la vie.