Having spammers hit your blog or forum? Why not block them by rules in htaccess to start with! Adding the spammers IP to your htaccess file keeps it from hitting your site to start with and keeping the website more accessible for the real users. With the help of a website and a small Python program I wrote that is exactly what I did.
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I’ve got a printer connected on my Windows machine and it’s shared so I can print from my Ubuntu Intrepid machine as well using Samba. It works pretty well. I usually only print from OpenOffice 3 but today I had to print an email (Claws mail) and it failed. I got the Printer selection box but when I clicked on print an error message popped up, “Can’t prompt for Authorization”. I checked my printer settings and everything looked fine, so I tried again, another error message popped up: “Too many failed attempts”.
After sending an email to the Claws Mail list, Colin Leroy pointed out it could be a bug in GTK as I also couldn’t print from Gedit. I did some searching on the Internet and found several reports similar to mine but no solution.
I started to do some researching on my laptop and I found a work around to solve the problem.
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Since a few days it turns out my blog is causing high CPU utilization for the PHP process. So much that my provider has given me two weeks to solve it. If not I have to “make alternative arrangements.” which comes down to four options:
1. Upgrade my package to the VPS Plan.
2. Upgrade my package to the Dedicated hosting plan.
3. Host somewhere else.
4. Give up this blog completely.
Here’s what I don’t get though, according to Google Analyctics I have only around 250 visitors a day. Anyway, here’s what i’ve done so far without any luck:
Installed WP-Supercache
Why: Instead of going through index.php it serves files directly by using rewrite rules in htaccess
Outcome: This seem to have relieved a small bit of the pain but I’m still averaging 70% CPU utilization.
Deactivate the Sociable plugin
Why: This was the only plugin I upgraded just 2 days before the mayhem started.
Outcome: Didn’t do anything
Added IP’s to htaccess to deny access
Why: It wasn’t only WordPress that caused high CPU, also my forum. When I checked the IP’s that accessed my forum it turned out that of the 441 IP that accessed my forum in Nov, approximately 132 were known forum spammers.
Outcome: Helped a little bit, more IP’s added
Blocked certain pages
Why: People were accessing the pages directly and they didn’t have any need for it
Outcome: Precise outcome unknown
Stopped saving of drafts
Why: I saw a long list of accessing the drafs, even when I wasn’t logged in
Outcome: Precise outcome unknown
Well the CPU utilization is under control right now. I’m not really sure what caused it. That’s the bad part of using a host without shell access, you can’t really see immediate effects on changes you make.
I believe the biggest problem was spammers hitting my blog, as it happened long after my initial increase of readers. I didn’t change anything around the day the problem started, except for the plugin upgrade which wasn’t the cause.
