Wednesday 26 July 2006

Pic of the day: Fighting evil spammers. Well, actually Dremora, in the game Oblivion. Oh, and the color of the sword is just a spell effect. I don't actually wear a rose-colored sword. Right, guys? Guys?

I BAANNISH you!

Sorry, I had to think of this line from the game Oblivion, where it is spoken (or rather bellowed) in an unearthly voice by certain Daedra, or demons, during fights. I'm not exactly that kind of person, but lately I banish people on a daily basis. So far they seem to grow back, but we'll see in the end who wins out. And I'm probably doing it for no good purpose.

I'm talking about the Chaos Node Forum. I'll be the first to admit that the forum hasn't been much of a success. This is probably because most of my hundreds of visitors come for the anime pictures. You may think this is strange since there are hundreds if not thousands of websites dedicated to anime pictures. Make that thousands or tens of thousands, I guess. But this does not stop the true otaku, the nerd obsessed with manga, anime and games. They have 18 hours a day to spend on searching for anything related to that particular anime character (usually a girl) who is the center of their confused universe. School or work falls off the edge of their world. They stay in their room except when they need to forage for food. And sooner or later they come to the Chaos Node. They are not my problem, however.

No, the problem is that lately my forum has become infested with spammers. Actually I don't know if these are underpaid Asians cutting and pasting the string of disgusting links, or bots... programs that automatically appends messages to message boards without manual intervention. Probably the latter. It is like the spam in e-mail, except it is on message boards / forums. The same mindless drivel. You don't even need to read it to see that, the brain's automatic pattern recognition categorizes it as "mindless drivel" within a fraction of a second. The brain is an awesome tool! At least mine is.

Given that the legitimate use of the forum is once a year or less, you'd think the most obvious solution would be to just close down the whole thing. But that's not the kind of guy I am. It is important for me to share my thoughts with the world (although most of those thoughts probably don't mean much on their own). So obviously I would want my readers to be able to share their thoughts too. Not just with me, although that is certainly appreciated. I love every little e-mail I get! But by using my forum, you can also be read by other people. There is a lot more people reading it than writing it. There are in fact a lot more people reading it than it deserves at this point. I have no idea why people register there if they don't write anything. But who am I to stop them? The spammers, however, I'm the one to stop.

What I do is once a day or so to harvest the IP adresses of the new spam messages, and ban them. I BAANNISH YOU! True, the next day they come back with another IP address and the same mindless drivel. But there are only so many million IP adresses (until IPv6 is implemented, really soon now, at which point there will be trillions of them). Be that as it may, each IP address represents a physical computer on the Net. And spammers may have a large number of these, but not limitless. So I ban them one by one.

In the unlikely case that you find yourself banned from the Chaos Node Forum, it is most likely that you share an ISP with a spammer. Each time you reconnect to the Internet, you get a new IP from your Internet Service Provider (this is called "dynamic" IP, unlike the static IP that businesses use). If you inherit the address of a spammer, you may be banned from this forum (and many others). But most likely you'll never know.

Modern forum software includes a test where you have to prove that you are a human to post, by reading a distorted text and typing it. I doubt I'll upgrade to this anytime soon. But I may stop my current practice of letting unregistered users (guest) post. As long as nobody except the spammers do it anyway, I mean.