GearHack: Fight Comment Spam, Ban IP's

Fight Comment Spam, Ban IP's

For a while now, I have been fighting comment, track-back, and link spam. It seems that as soon as your blog or web site gets a little bit of traffic, it start attracting spammers all over the world. So if you have a site that allows comments, trackbacks, or links, you'll need a method to deal with spam.

When spammers spam your site, they generally use a series of open proxies or bots. Open proxy is a public relay server on the Internet. Bots are computers that have been taken over by spammers. Very rarely do sparnmers use their own IP's for spamming. If they did, it world be easy to shutdown their operation.

I found one method to stop spam quite effective. And that is to ban open proxy and bot IP's. So I started collecting IP's from spams that I get. At first, it was a tedious manual task. But soon, the list grew. And with the help of honey pots and automated processing, the task became easier. Now it is at a point where the IP ban stops 95% to 99% of the spam. So far, not a single valid comment has been banned from using this IP list. As the list continues to grow, it will continue to improve its effectivity.

I have been sitting on this list for quite some time now. And I could see the spammers are relentless, because they kept on coming back even though the spams that do get through are deleted within a day. I am tired of them trying to take advantage of the good folks who are distributing information on the Internet. So l decided to distribute my IP ban list on this web site to help you fend off spams. The IP's are gathered from several web sites that I run, including the very popular Camera Hacker web site. The ban list is updated periodically; once a day currently. Dates are noted with the list.

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Tips

The list is big and will get bigger. Insert the list into a database (say MySQL) for fast queries.

When you download the list, always clear out the old list then insert the new list. Some entries may be removed when the list is updated.

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IP List

The two lists below are identical. They are just archived differently. One list is archived using ZIP, while the other list is archived with tar and gz. Download the archive that is convenient for your system.


Approximate File Size: 91034012
Number of Entries: 37143727
Tue Jul  8 00:09:16 UTC 2014


Approximate File Size: 429
Number of Entries: 0
Tue Jul  8 00:31:03 UTC 2014

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Fight Comment Spam, Ban IP's

Tips

IP List

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