A Passion for Running

I hate SPAMMERS so much. I’m pretty sure I hate them more than Jon hates his neighbor’s dogs and believe me, that’s saying something.

You’ve all gotten email spam so I don’t have to tell you how irritating that stuff is but when you manage a domain like Aaron and I do, the whole spam thing elevates to a whole other realm.

I remember in our first month, completerunning was suddenly one day deluged with hundreds upon hundreds of email rejection notices. Apparently, some SOB spammer had forged their garbage advertisements under fake completerunning email addresses. Being new at the whole thing, we had no idea what do to so we read up and found out there isn’t much one CAN do. Argh. So, we ended up shutting down our email addresses for a week or two until it passed.

But the damage had been done. That’s because when spammers forge multiple emails from your domain, a rather unfortunate and completely understandable thing happens – half the internet thinks YOUR domain is a spammer and you end up on spam filtering lists. Double argh.

Fast forward a month or so and we discover blogs. Yay! Well, “yay” for a while because shortly after we discovered blogs, the spammers discovered our blogs and we got to learn about comment spam. Comment spam is, IMHO, way worse than email spam. It never ever ends. These jerks are constantly knocking at the door trying to find a way in to leave their garbage in your house. I could just scream thinking about the war I’ve waged against them. To give you an idea, the completerunning domain has been visited over 57,000 times SO FAR in April. That’s right, over fifty seven thousand times, spammers have tried and been denied access. How is that possible you ask? Well basically, they park their spambots at the entrance and they knock and knock and knock at the door and under the door, they turn the knob, they try to pick the lock and remove the hinges. They do this over and over and over and over…they NEVER stop. And every once in a while, they manage to sneak a few past your defenses so you gotta figure out how they did that and plug the hole. grrrr…

When WordPress 1.5 came out, things got better – much better because WP 1.5 has some great spam management tools built right in. Things also got better because I learned some other tricks to protect the entire domain all at once rather than one blog at a time.

The lastest attacks are on the other domains I manage. Those being Lori’s dayhome.ca domain and my own personal iocchelli.com domain.

So what’s happening over there? In a word, more of the same. I’ve had to implement anti-comment spam measures and just the other day those f’in bastiches once again deluged the internet with spam email this time by forging iocchelli.com email addresses. *sigh*

Why can’t the world beat this stuff?

Sorry, I just needed to vent a bit. Anybody got some advice or a nice, dry Martini they’d like to share?