htaccess file generated from Stop Spammers.

If you are looking for an alternative to Stop Spammers I may have a solution. I have an altered version of my stop spammers plugin that is collecting the IP address of spammers. It generates an htaccess deny for the CIDR of the network owning the IP. You don’t need the plugin, but you can install the results of running it.

If you are running under apache, then you should download the htaccess file at: https://www.blogseye.com/htaccess.txt and add it to the top of your htaccess file. It should contain the only order directive in the htaccess file. (Make sure that you test your site after installing the altered htaccess file.)

The only drawback is that the htaccess file denies a big chunk of China and much of Russia, so if you count on these countries for users it will take some editing and will not block the flood of spam coming from these countries. China is responsible for the overwhelming majority of spam and attacks on my site, with Russia second.

The file is updated every time a spammer hits one of 12 of my sites. I run a summary program on it several times a day to consolidate the data. You need to update your htaccess file from this text file frequently in order to block newly found spam sources.

72% of the page hits on my sites are from spammers, malicious or rogue robots, referrer spammers, or login attacks. This htaccess has cut out about 95% of these and is improving as it identifies new spam sources.

My Quantcast statistics have remained constant over the last month while the number of “403 denied” messages keeps growing. The htaccess file has not affected my normal traffic. I am down to just a few dozen bad hits a day, down from about five hundred.

Your feedback would be appreciated.

Keith Graham

https://www.ads-software.com/plugins/stop-spammer-registrations-plugin/