Friday October 15, 2004

Re: Re: The Referer Spam battle rages on

I just had a thought: how about Referer throttling? Like implemented elsewhere for Comments (we should do that for Roller): don't increment Referer count, from the same IP, for 'X' seconds. Not sure exactly how we'd record this efficiently though.

This occurs to me because I see most of the spammers hitting me about 10-30 times in a short period. If they are limited to a hitcount of one they are more likely to be pushed off the bottom of my published referer list. Just an idea, discuss.
( Oct 15 2004, 01:37:50 PM ) Technology Permalink Comments [2] [Trackback]

Thursday October 14, 2004

The Referer Spam battle rages on

The referer spam scum have been coming on in waves the last few days. I keep deleting them and updating my blocking list. Dunno if it's doing much good, but you may want to update your list as well.

Anyone caught with a referer that matches from that list receives a 403. This is rather a viscious response I think, and now I'm afraid I'll have to get tougher (log the IP address of offenders and refuse them as well). I fear this will result in collateral damage as dialup dynamic IPs rotate from offenders to the innocent.
( Oct 14 2004, 12:49:00 PM ) Technology Permalink Comments [2] [Trackback]

For further reading on today's posts:

Blogging Roller : Lance comments on recent surge in referrer spam. I've been deleting referrers and adding ugly new ignore words to my Roller installation on a daily basis this week. It is really getting bad. Three options I would like to see in Roller:

Wednesday October 06, 2004

re: more travel Funny how things work out. Cameron was scheduled to be in town today. Unfortunately he didn't have time to get together for beer. So how serendipitous that I was invited at the last minute to attend a presentation on Coherence!
( Oct 06 2004, 02:59:19 PM ) Personal Permalink [Trackback]

Thursday September 30, 2004

Better now and busy. Back on the 5th of August I wrote about a couple spam problems I was having. Shortly afterward I rolled the new functionality into Roller (a Roller-wide Referer-Spam list), and I used it to block requests with those referers (they get a 403 Denied).

My site has continued to be stable ever since then and I haven't seen nearly so much CPU usage. Sadly, I've been very busy with work and family the last month and haven't had time for much of anything, let alone more Roller enhancements.
( Sep 30 2004, 06:55:22 AM ) Roller Permalink [Trackback]

Tuesday September 14, 2004

Tree of Life, Tree of Death

I don't know what Jen will think of this, but I like it. That page doesn't explain it all, so follow the Project link too. Warning: slow-loading site.
( Sep 14 2004, 12:02:01 PM ) Personal Permalink Comments [1] [Trackback]

Friday September 03, 2004

toString() is a dangerous weapon

I just spend a couple hours trying to figure out why I couldn't get something out of a Map after I'd put it in. I added all sorts of debug output which showed that the URL I was using for a key went in, but somehow it wasn't there milliseconds later.

After chasing my tail for god-knows-how-long it finally dawned on me that I was putting a URL instance in but requesting a url String?! The confusing was that printing out the URL object and the URL string looked exactly the same. URL.toString(): dangerous.

Doh!
( Sep 03 2004, 10:49:40 AM ) Technology Permalink Comments [3] [Trackback]

Tuesday August 17, 2004

Re: This is about Atom

Beautiful. I hope the more vocal members of the Atom mailing list read it. I think Matt makes some important points that these members need to keep in mind, not that some of them aren't already.

But what Atom says is: If you want to play the weblog game, this is the metadata you need. That, and some other stuff (it's all in the Atom spec).

. . .

What Atom says is: If you want to afford these behaviours, then you have to be weblog-like in this respect and editor-like in this respect, and it doesn't matter what else you do, but those are the shapes we require.

( Aug 17 2004, 08:32:33 AM ) Atom Permalink [Trackback]

Friday August 13, 2004

Thanks Rusty

While trying to make Roller more friendly to non-ascii users we ran into the issue of non-ascii characters used in entry titles. These munged the permalinks we generated, until someone (Jaap, was it you?) was clever enough to escape these characters. Today Rusty announced the posting of the Internationalized Resource Identifiers draft, a standard which could really help to alleviate the current problems with non-ascii text in URLs.
( Aug 13 2004, 01:03:51 PM ) Technology Permalink [Trackback] [Link]