I think my spam blocking is starting to work.
I checked my spam stats today for the first time in a few days and out of 14 blogs I had five hits in the Stop Spammer history. When I started this project Stop Spammers would report about 500 to 1000 blocked attempts across all blogs per day.
The traffic at my sites is down to about one third, but I think that is because so much of my traffic was from spammers and other robots. The income from ads has actually started to climb again. I think I was penalized for a while because spammers were clicking links. (I have heard most of these come from Vietnam).
I run a scan of my logs that calculates what percentage of all hits is blocked with a 403 access denied message and it is down to 15%. When I started blocking, it was as high as 60% of traffic blocked. I think the spammers learn that they can’t access my sites so they stop trying. The 15% that do get blocked look like spammers, though. I can tell they are mostly from countries outside of North America or Western Europe. I hate to discount Russia, China, and third world countries, but honestly, someone from Indonesia is not likely to be interested in my ramblings on science fiction.
I am thinking about making a static clone of some of my websites that don’t have the huge IP deny list. In this way people can get at the content but are not able to login or leave messages. There is an SEO penalty for this, I think, so I will have to consider it.
Since I have been getting so few new spam hits I have started grabbing the Stop Form Spam nightly list. It s about 9000 entries long. I filter and eliminate the IP addresses I know are bad or white listed and it comes to about 400 new ip address a day. I add these to the master list when I generate the ip deny file.
I wrote a plugin that checks incoming IP numbers against my my master “bad neighborhood” list, but it is very slow. I have to figure a way to speed it up for it to be effective.
I am going to spend my lunch hour trying to figure ways to white list rss feeds so people can access them. I have had complaints.