UPDATED 23 SEP: I have to start moderating comments made to this blog because I'm forced to delete no fewer than 200 comment spams every day. They are slipping through the CAPTCHA and "NO-HTML" filters I've applied here. However, an equally large number are being stopped by the spam-word filter used by Six Apart. Sorry for slowing down the communications. Thanks for commenting.
UPDATED 22 SEP: The Captcha system used by Six Apart failed to stop another 315 spam attempts last night. This is both a weblog and an email burden. I plan to republish this blog site while invoking Typekey for comments. These comment spam attacks should not succeed. If you read this and have the time to make a comment, please indicate whether you are challenged by Typekey before you can make your comment.
UPDATED 21 SEP: The Captcha system used by Six Apart should have stopped all 385 spam attempts yesterday. However, somehow the system became disconnected to my blog pages. I solved my problem by republishing my site, something I'm hesitant to do because I've more than 5000 pages here. Now I can see comment spammers trying their craft to no avail. From the looks at some of the IP blocks, it appears to be a Fair Trade activity--I wonder if I'm hurting some unfortunate by taking away an easy source of income when I lock down against comment spam.
I KNOW WHEN more than 2000 people visit here on a single day because I've got to manually delete a handful of trackback spammers. But when more than 3000 people visit, I attract my fair share of comment spammers. Today marks a high water level of more than 300 comment spams coming from more than 40 different IPs. If you care about these things and manually block the IPs of unwelcome visitors, I've recorded some of the suspects and their points of origin below. I knew this kind of high water spamming was coming because a colleague was given a takedown order on his blog after HEANET detected it was being used as a phishing launch pad. My visitors don't appear to be jumping off from academic domains. They appear to be circumventing the IP blacklist I've carefully articulated so I've added a bunch of prohibited terms to my anti-spam list. If you try to comment on drugs, you're probably going to be rebuffed.
I blocked more spammers today than in any other day since I started blogging five years ago, and I listed a few of the first ones that I've blocked:
207.68.239.252 Atlanta, Georgia, USA
84.96.92.5 Bib Services, France
89.110.26.112 St Petersburg, Russia
211.204.111.1 Hananet, Seoul, Korea
221.146.128.98 KORNET, Korea
201.37.81.29 Net Servios de Comunicao, Sao Paulo, Brazil
203.241.185.168 DSU Net, Seoul, Korea
203.255.35.161 GYEONG-Net, Chinju, Korea
58.142.111.174 CMN-INFRA, Seoul, Korea
201.6.234.242 Net Servios de Comunicao, Sao Paulo, Brazil
61.143.150.124 Zhongxin Middle School, Beijing, China
213.194.96.3 Pharmacante, Istanbul, Turkey
195.17.37.70 Intron, Visby, Gotland, Sweden
69.31.41.50 Pilosoft, New York, USA
221.248.87.21 FTTH Broadband, Tokyo, Japan
218.220.96.171 Japan Network Information Service, Tokyo, Japan
84.96.92.54 BIB Services, Boulougne BIllancourt, France
70.176.137.189 Cox Communications, Phoenix, Arizona
202.55.40.59 Powercom, Hong Kong
