My new software keeps adding new spammers to my htaccess list. It is getting very large. The spam, however, keeps arriving. I have blocked sever dozen Chinese networks, and dozens of hosting sites, but new spammers keep cropping up.
I am writing a program that takes my spam list and goes out to whois.lacnic.net and returns the range of the network where the ip originates, plus the country and the name of the network. I will let it run and then edit the results.
I don’t want to completely block European or North American networks such as COX, Verizon or other ISPs, because is where I make my money. I do want to block hosts like Nobis who allow spammers free reign. Looking up hundreds of networks by hand takes too long, so I need to finish the automation. This could knock off about two thirds of the IPs on the list and replace them with a single line of “deny” code for an entire network.
I want to organize the list so that people who want to allow access from Chinese networks or Russian networks can edit them easily but still leave the scummy hosting companies, and some other hot spots.
The code for this is event driven and plugs into the WordPress architecture. It is based on a plugin class I wrote. I am trying to make the plugin class generic with generic calls to many WP API functions so that I can translate them for use with JOOMLA or other forums and content managers. I hope to port to C and create an Apache handler so Hosting Companies can just plug it in for their users.
I am 63 years old and I hope to retire soon. My job takes most of my energy so I don’t have much time to work on this stuff. It is going very slowly. It won’t be long before this becomes a full time job for me.
Any ideas?