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Rants: The gorramn spammers must be stopped!
Tue, 19 Sep 2006

Those bastards have done it again! Aaargh!

Six months or a year ago I was pretty annoyed when my blog here started to get over-run with spam -- automated faked replies to my entries; comments that were essentially adverts to some random site loaded with viruses and such. Certainly they offered nothing of value but more to point -- they occupied my resources for their purposes and violated my conditions of use... of common decency. Fine, sobeit -- the blog software I use is convenient for me but not so well protected against such attacks so as with all things done out of generousity, bastards-of-the-world would destroy it. Rather than invest time ot deal with it I just removed the comment system and put links to LJ .. sucks, but what can you do?

Well, the bastards have gone and done it again!

On the Codejedi main site I've long had a simple message board (driven by the YaBB CGI code); at one point I was using it as a support mechanism for my costware applications but decided I was being drawn too thin - support email, mailing lists, message board, various other forums.. too much. In the end I left it up mostly unmoderated for my freeware applications and contests and such -- a place for people of common interest to hang out and help support each other or for me to leave reference posts for others to see later, etc. It was good and time passed, with only a spam here or there that I could remove by casually inspecting every week or two or the like. That was all well and good until recently...

After checking a support query in email today ("the BBS is down!") I figured out he meant the message board and took a look; it was only down due to power failures but upon casting a gaze over its once furtile grounds I was shocked.. it was spammed. To hell. I started to hack together some scripts to analyze the damage, looking for buzzwords like "cialis" and "pharmacy" and "lesbian" and "med ica7ion" that seemed common. Without even looking into the trickier stealth pr0n bombs I see some 20,000 or more spams across the 15 or 20 sub-message-boards. Oh my _gawd_ thats a lot of work to remove from the indexes and files and such.

So .. its time has passed. I've moved it all off to an archive and terminated the message board. I simply cannot support all those links.. to actually help those bastards in their google-rank and possibly direct some worthy denizen to their filthy part of town. But more -- 20,000 spams, of short to long length. Thats my disk space, my terms and conditions, my net bandwidth .. stuff paid for by me. Thats outright theft, and outright illegal. Everyone knows.

Yet its theft on such grand scale across the net that not only does everyone know about it, but everyone deals with it. How much money and time is lost every day on dealing with that? I know the ISPs suffer enormous loads pouring through every email to combat this stuff. Again it takes you back - when someone robs an old lady at gunpoint, or someone spams a million people and abuses thousands of resources.. you have to wonder.. what the hell is wrong with them? Do the spammers get annoyed when they in turn get spammed? Do they see the irony?

I'm so annoyed. What a bunch of sacks of crap.

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