Stupid Comment Spammers

Spambots are continuing to attack the old OFB archive (which runs PHP-Nuke). The new OFB site runs SAFARI, but I left the old site up as an archive of the first five years worth of articles. I ended up having to turn off comments because spammers were adding hundreds of spams to the articles.

While they are no longer able to add actual comments, these spammers also seem to hope to spread their names by using bogus referrer data when accessing the site (since many sites list what sites are linking to them). So, I still see hundreds of page views show up in my logs each day that try to access the comment pages that no longer exist and leave referrer links to insurance, pharmacy and poker sites. It is making it hard to gather relevant statistics with so much “noise.”

To combat this, I've moved some things around while trying to make it so real human visitors can still find the pages they want without additional hassles. We'll see if what I've done actually helps.