This morning I set to the task of de-spamming Author Buzz. There is always a trickle of deeply suspect junk accounts being registered. However, of late, there have been enough spam accounts that the real users have started to notice.

It was time to take action.

I’m not going to detail exactly what I did. Mostly, because I don’t want to clue the spammers into how to avoid being blocked.

I will say this thought. I was grateful for the large amount of spam with which to train the filters.

Previously, I had tried blocking Chinese IP addresses and other non-English speaking countries that seemed to only hit us with spam. That worked for a little while but then the spammers “changed country”. I’m guessing they use might VPNs or Onion Routing to hide where they are operating from.

That ended up working in my favour as I got a good chunk of sample data with which to remove spam accounts and block future ones.

Short term fix

Fighting spam is a constant arms race. For every way we find to block them, they find new ways not to be blocked.

I have no doubt the spammers will be back some day. I also lack any doubts that we will block and remove them then too.

As long as us site admins stay vigilant all the most innovative spammers will do is make it certain that a whole load of tricks are useless for slower or less inventive spammers. Spammers are inherently lazy. That laziness has, for twenty years, been the way they trip up.

In the end, the spammers always lose due to their own efforts.