[08-Mar-2012] New SPAM mitigation scheme in place

Thanks sb. Much appreciated that you've chosen an approach that won't affect the BLF vibe.

It's mainly to prevent a malicious robot from hammering the server with search requests, which are fairly heavy on resources. I guess I could probably change that one to a math CAPTCHA.

To Admin/Mod

Job Well Done!

Why would someone hammer the internal search? What is achieved by that for them? They just would raise the server load. Wouldn't a time frame for max search sessions be more efficient to prevent that? Like 1 internal search every 30/60 secs max.

Test.

OK, officially confirming the canning of the first spammer on BLF since the new system was implemented. His name was "talk", and he is survived by 102,345,655 fellow spammers, who will be following him to BLF to meet the same fate.

He made his first post at 04:59, and his 11th and last post was at 05:11. At 05:04 he received his first hit, and the KO punch was made by the heavyweight champion "Raccoon City" at 05:12. The spammer received more hits after he was already down, which were probably made to clean up residual posts that he had already made. So notice that he stopped posting 12 minutes after starting, in which time he managed to make 11 posts, and his last post and his time of banning are only one minute apart, which suggests that he would have kept on posting if it weren't for the ban. I'm pretty happy with the results, especially considering that this occurred during one of the lower traffic times at BLF. What do you think?

Thanks for your efforts SB! Hope we can get back to normal!

-Garry

Outstanding! Thank you for your efforts.

Ah, relief at last, thank you!

Great Success!!

Ps. Would you please bring back the short quotations in notification emails?

Great Job!

Thanks!!!

Thanks Mr.Admin!

Good Job!

Ah, somebody noticed. :) Unfortunately I can't immediately bring them back. Our host disabled mail sending because the excerpts of the posts by spammer contained spam links, which can cause the entire hosting company to get blacklisted. So I'd have to figure out a way to disable the links in the emails, which I don't know how to do. The only option to get our mail server re-enabled was to disable the comment excerpts. Sorry for the inconvenience!

Thanks for the hard work sb56637 ;)!

Thank you sb .

Great job, thanks. I'm in the mood to go hunting now...

Way to go everybody!

Thank you

What those other folks said, then + 1!

Thank you mr Admin!