Bots
14-04-2013I've not been doing a lot of coding on the sites lately, for no real reason other than I've nothing that I want to code for them.
Half Baked Potatoes more or less looks after itself. The Bauble hasn't needed anything added since I got the Instagram thing working. There are some bits that I might change on the writing site, but I'm going to wait until the writing site is truly needed before changing them. So basically my coding has been limited to the little scripts I've created in work for one thing or another.
Until the other day I got an email from the lady friend's site saying somebody had commented on an entry I had also commented on. Being nosy I went and had a look.
Only to see that the poor site had been hit by a few spam bots over the last couple of weeks.
The lady friend mentioned it to me, but I've been distracted with work so much that I said "Sure, I'll look at it later." and completely forgot about it.
So a few weeks later she has more and more spam on it. In fact there were over one hundred spam comments in the database her site has.
That's a hell of a lot for a little site that doesn't get a lot of traffic lately. In fact the reason she had stopped using it was because of the amount of spam she was getting. All I can say is thank god for SQL delete statements and bots that use the same format of name.
Now generally when I make a change on The Bauble it gets slurped into any other sites that I code up as well. Basically The Bauble gets treated like a live testing ground. To quote a poster in the office 'I don't always test my code but when I do, I do it in production.'.
Turns out that when I removed captchas from my own site I never brought that change into the lady friend's one. Poor show. So I made the required changes and set the code live.
Only the next day to see five spam comments make it back into her site.
Turns out that I can't copy-paste from my own site
One little letter out of place and everything falls apart. Hilarious.
All seems to be fixed now. Not exactly a flexing of the code muscles but enough to make the problem interesting.
Blue_jester