In recent months, I’ve had more and more trouble with spammers and malicious code here at ABDPBT. I’m not sure if this is a sign of more trouble across the board on the net, or just a run of bad luck, but I’ve been back and forth with Liquid Web Tech Support quite a bit recently to get spam stuff removed from my site, and this has had me thanking my lucky stars (yet again) that I made the choice to switch hosting companies when I did, because these problems are little more than a momentary headache when you have a good hosting company to help you. Back on my former company, it would be days before I would hear from anybody on tech support, and even then, I’d probably be expected to figure out exactly the source of the problem, which ordinarily beyond me in terms of tech skills.
But even with great hosting, it would be nice to just skip the BS in the first place, which was why I was excited to see that Jeff Star released an IP blacklist last week to help you keep some of the worst offenders off your site altogether. If you’re not familiar with Jeff Starr, he writes at Perishable Press and is Chris Coyier’s partner in the Digging Into WordPress project. Basically, he knows a hell of a lot more about WordPress and CSS and just about everything to do with the web than I do, and he’s gone through all of his server records looking for the IP addresses that came up the most often on his server records associated with attacks of spam, malicious code, and the like. For a detailed explanation of how he determined which IPs should be included on this blacklist, please read his whole post — it’s a pretty comprehensive process, and I feel comfortable sharing it without worrying that numbers were placed on it without careful consideration. Or because they were commie pinko IP addresses or something.
Anyway, here’s some stuff to consider and how to use the list if you’re interested in blocking these IPs:
- Bear in mind that this is a temporary solution. Blocking IPs only works until the spammer gets a new one, and they will get a new one, so this does not permanently solve anything. However, Jeff Starr says he’s noticed that the IP will continue to spam through one IP until it gets blocked, so it is worthwhile to block IPs individually anyway. That’s why he does this IP blacklist thingy and updates it on a semi yearly basis. So if you use this, bear in mind that at some point in the future it will become useless unless it is updated — it won’t hurt your site to have it, but it will cease to be effective.
- Go over to Perishable Press and copy the list, upload to your .htaccess file. There are two ways to get this thing working on your self-hosted site. One is to just go over to the post linked above, copy Jeff’s code, and paste it into your .htaccess file. If that sentence makes sense to you, *and* your hosting company gives you access to your .htaccess file, then go ahead and do it that way. If not, read below.
- Add IPs manually through Control Panel, or submit a support ticket with the list. My hosting company doesn’t allow me direct access to the .htaccess file, so I uploaded the IP addresses through my Control Panel. If you are a Liquid Web customer, you can access this through the Control Panel in a feature called IP Deny Manager. The other option is to leave a support ticket and ask them to do it for you, which would be easier for you, since the IP Deny Manager requires you to do it one by one.
Happy spam blocking!
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