Just when I thought it was over—Lorien’s older sister just got in to town with her 3.5 kids.
I received about 10 messages last night from a spammer—on my phone. I have a system here that lets people send me messages instantly, and it works pretty well. I get messages from time to time and they’ve always been legitimate, but I can’t think of anything legitimate about pokemon pr0n (the subject of one of my hated messages last night). I mean come on, that’s just wrong. Of course, I immediately banned the entire subnet (/8 netmask, about 16.5m IPs), which stopped the flood of spam, but I would like a more clean solution. Perhaps a limit of one message per day per IP would be reasonable.
PS Upon thinking about it, a limit like that is useless. People need to pay for what they’re doing, and if the only people that notice are the other people using the same service, well I guess that’s just too bad. Life’s not fair. The spammers are ruining things for everyone. I’ve initiated a set of rewrite rules in Apache to take any IP coming from a known-to-me spammer network and rewrite the incoming HTTP request to a this address is banned for spamming page. I know this will still allow them in, but anything they request, any link they follow to my site, will tell them they are being punished for using services that spammers also use. Too bad for them.