Goodbye, Bob

September 8, 2004

MT-Blacklist does an excellent job of preventing comment spam here. However, one spammer's posts were getting through: the one common factor is an email address: bob@y####o.com. The problem with blocking these is that the #### is a different 2-4 digit string each time.

This kind of problem shows why regular expressions can be added as blacklist entries. I finally got fed up enough to look up how to write a regular expression to block these comment spams:

bob@y[0-9]*o.com

Goodbye, Bob.

Posted by Andrew Raff at September 8, 2004 10:19 AM
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Comments

Hey, I'm just testing some commenting here. Fun!

Posted by: Andrew on September 9, 2004 02:36 PM

just another test...

Posted by: Andrew on September 9, 2004 02:40 PM

Can I test too?

Posted by: Geoff Ramsey on September 10, 2004 12:23 PM

My biggest problem is that I "upgraded" and cannot yet run MTB; I have to wait for the updated version.

After that, I'll fry bob's punk ass.

Posted by: Paul Gutman on September 13, 2004 09:37 PM

Since adding this entry to the blacklist, it's blocked more than 100 attempts to spam comments. If nothing else, this is a good reason to stay behind the curve!

Posted by: Andrew on September 13, 2004 11:15 PM