Hi all!
The past few days I have received a few very similar spam submissions of
new rings to "Ringlink Demo", i.e. the demo installation of the Ringlink
program at www.ringlink.org. It seems as if somebody has written a
script for making automated ring submissions.
So far they have jumped between various mail servers. In order to at
least prevent more submissions from those servers, I've uploaded an
.htaccess file to the CGI directory with this content:
# Stopping spamming idiots
<Files newring.pl>
Deny from 72.36.154
Deny from 72.21.49
Deny from 216.86.146
Deny from 67.15.188
Deny from 147.202.65
Deny from 70.85.77
</Files>
Please note that such files work with Apache servers only. Other web
servers require other methods to prevent access to a resource.
It would be interesting to know if others have experienced similar abuse.
This incident raises the question if it's time to consider a CAPTCHA
feature in Ringlink. Personally I'm hesitating; recently I saw this
remark: "captcha ... those are those anoying picture text boxs that I
can never read." I couldn't agree more.
Your comments would be appreciated.
/ Gunnar