Well, it had to happen sooner or later. The SPAM scumbags have started to infect my blog board. This facility is not there for these parasites and I won’t allow them to use it. So, I’m moderating the blog board from now on. In order to do this effectively, I’m using my Tag Board rather than the native Blog-City item. While the Blog-City board allows a time delay before messages appear, it is inconvenient for users. Tag Board allows me to block offending IPs. So, we see how things go…
Hopefully there will be no inconvenience. If there is, I apologise, but I will not have these messages on my blog – I don’t pay for this site to provide free advertising for these people.
Edited to add: Sorry, it’s offline at the moment. I was fiddling with it and broke it. Technical support are on the case. Normal service will be resumed as soon as possible…
Given that blog comment and forum spammers tend to use open proxy servers, blocking the apparent IP address really does not help very much.
You have to take the appraoch of MT-Blacklist
http://www.jayallen.org/projects/mt-blacklist/
and SpamLookup
http://bradchoate.com/projects/spamlookup/
which block the URLs which the spammers are trying to promote in the Google search engine etc.
What happens if a spammer uses, say, a throwaway AOL account – are you going to deny access to your blog to all 36 million AOL users ?
A very useful resource for anti-blog spammers is the blog of Ann Elizabeth, the Norwegian SpamHuntress, which tracks some of the worst Bulgarian and Russian blog spammers:
http://spamhuntress.com/
”’Longrider replies: Thanks for the links. All this would block is entries on the message board. I’m already moderating (and deleting) trackback SPAM without it getting published. MT-Blacklist isn’t something that will help with this, I think (unfortunately). Ultimately, I don’t want the thing to appear in the first place. If it causes a problem for genuine users, I’ll soon know…”’
Good for you!