{"id":265,"date":"2006-09-25T19:01:38","date_gmt":"2006-09-25T18:01:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.sungate.co.uk\/?p=265"},"modified":"2006-09-25T19:01:38","modified_gmt":"2006-09-25T18:01:38","slug":"good-riddance-to-comment-spam","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sungate.co.uk\/?p=265","title":{"rendered":"Good riddance to comment spam"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve been using the Akismet plugin for comment-spam control for a while now, and it seems that it is very good at identifying spammy comments.  Which is good.<\/p>\n<p>However, so many inconsiderate, low-life @~$&#038;%!-ers have been spamming my site recently that on Saturday\/Sunday, the virtual machine on which this site was hosted was overloaded.  That&#8217;s right, killed simply due to the level of comment spam.  As far as I can determine after the fact from the logs, there were approximately 1000 comment spam hits in the last day alone.  This is not good.<\/p>\n<p>So, I&#8217;ve changed things.<\/p>\n<p>Two things:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>I&#8217;ve changed the URL for comment submission, to stop the automatic HTTP POST operations that most of the spammers were using.  This has the added benefit of ensuring that these automated submissions get an immediate 404 error, which ought to reduce load on my machine;<\/li>\n<li>I&#8217;ve decided that comments will no longer be allowed on old posts.  Therefore, I&#8217;ve put in a script which disallows comments to posts older than one month.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>This appears so far to have been effective.  Number of comment spams since I introduced the above 24 hours ago?  Zero.  Number of (failed) attempts to spam the old comment URL?  Just over 300.<\/p>\n<p>The machine feels much quicker and more responsive now too, which is as it should be.  Gits.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve been using the Akismet plugin for comment-spam control for a while now, and it seems that it is very good at identifying spammy comments. Which is good. However, so many inconsiderate, low-life @~$&#038;%!-ers have been spamming my site recently that on Saturday\/Sunday, the virtual machine on which this site was hosted was overloaded. That&#8217;s&#8230;&nbsp;(<a href=\"https:\/\/www.sungate.co.uk\/?p=265\">read more<\/a>)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-265","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sungate.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/265","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sungate.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sungate.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sungate.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sungate.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=265"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.sungate.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/265\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sungate.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=265"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sungate.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=265"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sungate.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=265"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}