Sorry for the lack of posts this week. The spammers have unleashed a botnet that is hitting blogs, forums, and email servers constantly trying to get spam through and unfortunately we’re one of their many targets. While my spam filters are doing a yeoman’s job scanning and rejecting the spam, the sheer volume of hits is bringing the server to it’s knees. More memory is on the way to help things along, but it’s been a fight. It’s amazing to watch the logs as dozens of computers hit the same file (post comment) within 5 seconds of each other. I’ve had sites I run get Slashdotted and Dugg and the server did fine, but this spam flood is making it scream for mercy. It’s one thing when 50,000 visitors hit your site to view content over the course of, say, 12 hours. Quite another when 500 hit your site, running CPU intensive comment and spam scanning code within 5 seconds.
Anyway, I’ve had to clamp way down on the web server, so during a spam flood you might get a ‘Server Too Busy’ message – just try again, you’ll get through. The new memory should let me loosen the reins a bit more. The next step may be CPU upgrades (it’s a Dual Opteron server – you’d think it could handle a few small traffic sites! 😉 )
I refuse to concede defeat to these losers.
Some of you may suggest turning comments off – I absolutely refuse to do that. One of the best parts about running this site is the comment conversations and debates you get to have with readers.
On a more positive note, we got invited to be part of BlogBurst the other day so that’s pretty cool. We’ll see if anything posted here gets pickup up.
The battle continues…
December 14th, 2006 at 11:24 am
Did you try BB2? When you turn off logging it’s a database-less generic filter against bad bots.
December 14th, 2006 at 11:30 am
Yup. I run Bad Behavior 2 and Spam Karma 2 w/Akismet. BB2 seems to catch about 25% of the hits. The rest get through and hit SK2 and Akismet.
January 28th, 2007 at 11:38 pm
[…] WordPress 2.1 is coming and there are some changes for plugins to deal with. Looking at what is changing and the Xinha4WP code, I don’t see any reason why Xinha4WP would not work on WordPress 2.1. I haven’t had a chance to install the 2.1 Alpha release and test yet (too busy fighting the spam floods), but I’m 99% sure it’ll be good to go. If any of you happen to be playing with 2.1, let me know if Xinha4WP works for you. I’d like to get it listed on the compatible page. […]