There has not yet been a single SPAM comment and the blog has been online for several weeks now. I guess those WordPress plugins really do work 
knock wood.
A few spammers have managed to get by the phpBB forum's anti-spam measures since that went live. So that will have to be locked down a bit more. I have better things to do than pick up after script kiddies.
But I do need to make an apology to some Arabs. It's seems that a request coming from the emirates.net.ae domain attempted to abuse the Toot-O-Matic with Java 2 v1.4.2_05 tutorial's feedback form. After that IP was blocked, they used another. When that one was blocked, they used another. Not too smart perhaps, but persistent.
Not that the form can be used to send SPAM, it can't, but I really don't need to have amateurs messing up my error logs either. So I have now blocked the offender's range of IPs. So why do I need to apologize to some Arabs? Well, I must confess that I can be rather lazy. And writing out 64 lines in my htaccess file to block all of the possible emirates.net.ae IP numbers would slow down server processing a bit. So I am using a regex. Here lies the root of my sin. I'm still a bit of a regex newbie, so I used
^213\.42\.2\.([0-9]|[1-3][0-9])$
^213\.42\.21\.([6-9][0-9])$
The problem? Using these regex lines also blocks out 16 non-offender IPs.
So to any Arabs coming from those 16 innocent domains, My Humble Apologies.
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