I knew what’d happened as soon as I started up Outlook this morning and saw that it was downloading message x out of 600 off my main blog account.
Last night, between 1:34am and 3:34am (EST) I was the target of an insanely large comment spamming spree.
During this two hour window, I received over 400 SPAM comment submissions, all from the same IP address: 71.104.45.2. Thank you Verizon!
Fortunately for me, I’m running the Akismet plugin. After 45 comments got through, Akismet caught on and started blocking all the rest as they came in, preventing them from ever making it to the post itself. Cue the 369 messages sitting in my Akismet management pane.
Groovy!
4 Comments so far
Abdul Mueid, on December 9, 2005 at 3:41am, said:
Groovy indeed.
Little feedback on Akismet: I’ve been recieving email saying Akismet has caught a comment spam bla bla bla but the comment itself doesn’t appear in the list of comments caught by Akismet nor the Moderation list. I recieved like 5 emails like this so far.
Waiting for the next release ;)
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Chris Meller, on December 9, 2005 at 7:36am, said:
Hmm… I’m getting emails every time Akismet (itself, blacklist, etc.) catches something. Unfortunately, the number that was supposedly the comment_id in the database appears not to be the comment_id in the database (or I’ve borked a SQL query and grabbed the wrong thing), so the email contains information about a totally unrelated post. Still, it lets me know that I’ve gotten something blocked by Akismet.
If you can nail down any kind of pattern to your bug, please let me know, since I’ve yet to see that particular behavior.
It’s been insanely crazy at work lately (enrollment season for all our clients), but that’s over now, so as soon as I finish exams for school (today and tomorrow are the last ones), I should have time to get back to the things that really matter: coding my own shit.
Keep me posted on any further problems, I promise a new version is coming soon, as well as a few cool other projects I’ve been mulling about lately! :)
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Abdul Mueid, on December 9, 2005 at 11:37am, said:
Alright doctor, here are is what exactly happens with my blog and akismet.
1. A spam comment comes in.
2. Akismet blocks that comment.
3. I get an email that Akismet has blocked a comment spam followed by an old stinky comment that I recieved long time ago (i think before installing akismet).
4. I go to Akismet’s blocked comments list and find lots-o-gay porn comments.
Any solution doctor?
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Chris Meller, on December 9, 2005 at 3:12pm, said:
Hmmm… Yeah, the emails are for comments that are old. It’s pulling the data based on what I thought was comment_id, but which is apparently some other number in the database, so it’s getting old posts. Doesn’t really have anything to do with Akismet’s install time, just old stuff in general.
Solution? Well if you want the gay porn, you could add it to the whitelist… :)
I don’t know why there would be lots of comments in Akismet’s block list if you’ve only gotten a few emails. Once you enable email notifications, you should get an email for every individual comment recieved (albeit, with wrong information). That’s why I had 400 emails in my inbox when my blog got hit hard: one for each SPAM message.
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