Jim Barcelona's Philosophy and Food Blog

I use Serendipity to publish my blog. It's great software, but one of it's features has been causing a bit of an annoyance. Yesterday, I asked, "Whom does information technology serve?" I gave the example of on-line dating and made the comment that although it is supposed to serve our desire for companionship it does it in a physical space where we'd least likely find a companion.

Well, this blog is supposed to allow for a lot of communication, especially with all the trackbacks and commenting it allows. However, as is the case in certain blogs, there are a lot of spammers out there that want to ruin things for non-tangent communication with the masses.

Lately, I've been getting a lot of these trackbacks:


Weblog Name: virtual strip poker

Link to remote-entry: http://insert-lame-spam-url-here/virtual-strip-poker.html



Excerpt:

You may find it interesting to check some relevant pages about virtual strip poker



I get a couple of these pieces of spam a day, so to solve this problem, I created a script that gives me the delete URLs:


#!/usr/bin/env bash



perl -ne 'print "$1\n" if /(http.*philo\/delete.*)/' /mail/barce



Still with me? The spammers got a bit more agressive and started sending more spam. So what did I do? I did a little research and now use a .htaccess file to forbid access from the spammers.

My .htaccess file looks something like this:

RewriteEngine On

RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://(www\.)?.*(-|.)poker(-|.).*$ [NC,OR]

RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://(www\.)?.*(-|.)poker.html$ [NC,OR]

RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://(www\.)?.*(-|.)lamedomain(-|.).*$ [NC]

RewriteRule .* - [F]



Thanks to the article at kuro5shin, I had a spam-free day, but now, they found a way to get to me without using a referer. I got spam today, and checked the logs and it said something like this:

65.165.84.11 - - [18/Feb/2005:17:05:32 -0500] "POST /philo/comment.php?type=trackback&entry_id=12 HTTP/1.0" 200 87 "-" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.5; Windows NT 5.0; N_o_k_i_a)"

Okay, now how do I stop them now? And isn't spam, a technology, enslaving me and wasting my time? Yes, and I don't know about the latter question. Any ideas?