Spammers! Grrrr!!!

Just when I thought I had the Chainki spammers on the run, they came back where and when I wasn't looking. I thought, over-confidently that the spammers were finished off by my nifty spam filter, but it does at least need keeping an eye on. I thought the site was largely able to look after itself. I stopped looking at changes.

Mistake!

While I wasn't looking for several months, Chinese spammers put hundreds of pages on the French pages of the site, before I noticed. Now, on the French part of the site, I filter (amongst other keywords):

• .org.cn
  
• .com.cn
  
• .net.cn
  
• .cn/
  

which should filter out ALL sites with a Chinese domain name (which have no place on the French pages!). Though that alone doesn't deal with the Chinese sites which use, for example, a dot com domain name, so in addition, I've added a number of particular specific offenders to my spam filter. Time will tell if I need to add many others, but for the moment things seem to be much better.

Another thing I have done is on some parts of the site, made it so that people have to create a login if they want to edit a page. This is a bit of a pity for the casual user who wants to make an improvement, but should also help reduce the casual spammer.

The spam war is one I certainly plan to win, but I do need to keep vigilant!