IP Banning Galore

[Jason Dunn]

On the off chance that you're a legitimate Digital Media Thoughts reader trying to post and you're getting an IP banned warning, it likely means you're from one of the locations I've banned. If you're a regular reader here, you've not doubt seen spammers blasting away in our forums posting their junk ads for cell phones and PS3s. I've been getting more aggressive in dealing with them lately, banning entire IP address blocks - basically, most of these spammers are using Internet cafes located in eastern Europe and Africa. To stop them, I'm blocking the entire IP address range assigned to the locations they're posting from. I haven't heard any complaints from anyone so far, but I thought I'd let you know what's up. ;-)

[Bob12]

Know what you mean. We're having the same problem on a website I moderate, plus the added nuisance of porn links. I banned two users today.

[mcsouth]

Ridiculous that it has to keep coming around to actions like this - if the spammers keep having their way with the Internet as they do, at what point do people throw their hands up and walk away? How many of you have had to abandon an email address because it became impossible to manage the spam, even with filters?

Our IT dept at work estimates that 75% of the email sent to our servers is spam - considering that our company has 20000+ people around the globe, that says something about the volume of spam they deal with daily. To their credit, they do a pretty good job of filtering it - I only see a few each day on my work account.

I have seen some websites become inundated with spam in the forums, so much so that people just stopped posting - you couldn't read a thread for all of the spam. So if spamming effectively "kills" a website, should there not be legal recourse for the person who's livelihood (potentially) is affected? Of course there should be - but how do you catch these bast**ds?

Okay rant over - but it just gets frustrating that this problem keeps getting worse, not better....

[Jason Dunn]

Okay rant over - but it just gets frustrating that this problem keeps getting worse, not better....

I hear you! The good news is that when Digital Media Thoughts merges with our new set of forums, we have a good system set up to stop spammers. So, patience... :-)

[hyedipin]

Spam the Spammers... :)

No matter what we do, they will never go away, just like the junk mail we get at home, although no expense to us, unlike bandwidth of our servers, it is still going strong.