Meta – Annemarie Pérez

A couple weeks ago I wrote about attacks by spammers on this domain. They’re generating so much traffic that I’m having to pay my domain host extra. The Bad Behavior software has helped, but caused it’s own problem. The spam traffic is so high that the log Bad Behavior keeps was filling up my disk space, even though the log purges itself every seven days.

Unable to solve the problem, I went back to P for help. Looking at the logs (so thank you Bad Behavior) he pointed out that a lot of the ‘bot traffic was directed at my login page. With his help I found a plugin Rename wp-login.php which does just what it said, helped me rename my login page so it’s not the WordPress default.

I know rationally there’s no point in being angry about this. Spammers spam. They do it for the money. It’s nothing personal. But I can’t help it, I’m angry my completely non-commercial domain is being attacked. I resent having to spend my time and P’s time in this arms race. I just want me and my students to have a nice space for our writing.

There, I’m done whining for today.… Read the rest

Not a video game.

This is a busy time for me. Yeah, yeah, Annemarie, I hear you say. We’re all busy. And I’m sure you are. But right now I’ve got three huge piles of grading nagging at me, job application deadlines and revisions to an article on Betita Martinez that need to be done.

So what has sucked up 6 hours since Friday? Trying to find a way to deal with spam traffic on this domain.

Mostly I don’t think a lot about spam. In fact, thanks to the ease of using WordPress and the general greatness of my host, Laughing Squid (how can you not want to host with a place called Laughing Squid?), I don’t think much about my multi domain install. It does what I need it to do, which is let me set up blogs for my classes and accounts for my students and then we do our thing. Askimet does its thing and, when I think about it, I empty the spam and delete the crap that hasn’t already been filtered.

I didn’t think I was in an arms race. I didn’t notice my numbers creeping up across all my archived course blogs. Then on Friday afternoon I got an email from the Squid help desk saying that since my domain was using close to three times the allowed “compute cycles” my hosting plan allows that they were moving me up to the more expensive plan. But even that wasn’t going to be enough. In addition to Mega Squid hosting, I was going to need two tacked on packages.… Read the rest

Category: Meta

Battling the ‘Bots (Part 2)

Battling the ‘Bots