Despite the captcha, I’ve gotten something over a thousand spam comments in the last month or two. Usually something to do with Tramadol, or Xanax, but with links to what appeared to be legitimate websites. They were coming in at such a rate and I was busy making tents, so I couldn’t really take the time to figure it out.
Today I took a couple of hours to look it over. Turns out that all but a handful of the spam was coming through just two ISPs in the Ukraine. A look at my we stats showed that the Ukraine had grown to be my biggest viewer, countrywise, in just a few months. More hits were coming from Ukraine than from the U.S.
I just blocked the ranges of IP addresses belonging to those two ISPs. I suppose it’s not inconceivable that I could have a legit customer who will now be unable to view my website, but frankly, it seems the risk is acceptable. Despite the flood of Ukrainian traffic, I have yet to receive a single real query from there, and anyway, I’m not blocking the whole country, just two ISPs.
If you left a comment in the last month or two, my apologies for not responding. They got hidden in the flood. I’m working on catching up now.