James Skemp's StrivingLife

The major failing of the Akismet plug-in is that you can't determine which IPs, if any, are spamming your site the most.

Akismet needs to have the ability to group by IP, as well as show counts for each IP.

In place of that, you can run the following query to get this information.

select comment_author_ip, count(comment_author_ip) count from wp_comments where comment_approved = 'spam' group by comment_author_ip order by count desc

This query will display the IP of the user who posted a message flagged as spam, and will also display the number of times a user with that IP posted a spam message. Of course, since Akismet deletes comments marked as spam after a certain amount of time, you'll need to run this on a semi-regular basis.

After you have this list, check out where the IP address points to, and if you don't see your users coming from that IP, block it through htaccess. I recommend you also add the date you did this in the comments, so you're aware of why you added the IP. In three months, you may also want to unblock the IP and see what happens.

Of course, you can also use another plug-in to automate this, but after hearing bad stories about the plug-in - Bad Behaviour - I'm not quite willing to go that route yet. Maybe in a couple of months I'll give it a shot.

This email was sent to abuse at hostfresh.com, approximately at the same time as this post.  For informational purposes, as well as my own tracking, I'm including it here.

===

Greetings,

I run a small site at http://strivinglife.net/ that uses the blogging software WordPress.

On Feb 21, 22, 23, and 24, the IP address 58.65.232.169 posted 88 comments that were marked as spam.  These comments consist of links to various blogspot.com blogs, some of which are listed below.

A Google search for this IP turned up a post in one of your support forums: http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=567556

An IP search showed your company as the owner: http://www.schwarzl.com/ipcheck.html?action=query&ip1=58&ip2=65&ip3=232&ip4=169

Hopefully, the box using this IP address has only be compromised with a bot, and not with a malicious user.

If you require any additional information from me, including log file information related to this IP address, please just let me know.  Please note that I would like to be updated as to the resolution of this matter.

Thank you for your time and assistance,

~James

=== Per the above, a selection of the titles used in said spam comments (number = count) ===

http://flexeril-huf.blogspot.com/      2
http://black-eyed-peas-lo.blogspot.com/     2
http://alltel-ringtones-pe.blogspot.com/     2
http://eminem-re.blogspot.com/     2
http://tera-patrick-now.blogspot.com/     2
http://healthinsurance-xen.blogspot.com/     2
http://pussycat-dolls-ju.blogspot.com/     2
http://jay-z-bi.blogspot.com/     2
http://samsung-ringtones-xo.blogspot.com/     2
http://verizon-ringtones-ni.blogspot.com/     2
http://autoinsurancequotes-luz.blogspot.com/     2
http://clip-art-now.blogspot.com/     2
http://zyrtec-rog.blogspot.com/     2
http://lindsay-lohan-hu.blogspot.com/     2
http://tupac-hu.blogspot.com/     2
http://real-ringtones-cu.blogspot.com/     2

=== ===

James Skemp

--
Administrator of:
- StrivingLife.net
- ClownsStealSouls.net
- DoNotDenyMyUnicorn.com
- FramingBusiness.net
- JamesRSkemp.net
- StopStriving.net

I was reading an article the other day, which was discussing a companies backup plan. It's suicidal for companies, in this day and age, not to have some kind of backup plan in place (and, most importantly, tested). Yet, for home users, especially those with important documents on their computers, it's almost approaching suicidal.

There's ways to do these backups by burning to CD or DVD, of course, and even Windows seems to have something built in (or at least my HP computer with a DVD-burner does), but you actually have to run the utility, and put a disc in the drive.

At the end of said article, there was a postscript regarding a backup Web site that the original poster used. Another individual, in the comments, added another point.

Enter online sites like Data Deposit Box and Mozy.

Mozy (referral code W2RM57) offers 2 GB of free space (I started with 2.2 GB). The unlimited plan starts at $4.95. There's also a plan available for businesses as well (since they'd certainly use a deal of bandwidth and space. One thing to note is that when you upgrade to unlimited, any computer you use that uses Mozy must also be upgraded to unlimited (which means $4.95 per computer, per month).

Data Deposit Box offers 1 GB at $2 per month, and a free 15 day trial. I've read some very good things about them online, but I've decided to try the free route first.

Dan Conderman also suggested GMail Drive, which uses Gmail to backup files. With this method, you are using a third-party utility to access Gmail, which appears to be against the terms. But, if it works ... it's fundamentally no different than emailing yourself something (although it is automatic, and can be done much faster) ...

Of course, with online backups, you have to trust the site that you're uploading your content to. What are they really going to do with that data, and how secure is it? You probably wouldn't want to move secure documents (unless they were encrypted personally) that contain financial records, but how about photos, or work product that doesn't contain sensitive information?

What about you? What backup procedures do you follow? What would need to happen for you to use backup software (online or off) on a regular basis?