« An Important Announcement | Main | Friday »

March 2, 2007

Web Site News - Spammers Gone Wild

by Ferdinand T Cat

The Conservative Cat Blog Empire provides many important trackback services, including the Linkfest Haven open trackback parties, the Permanent Floating Ping Festival in our sidebar, and the Cat Lover Page. For this reason our throttle rate is much higher than normal. A standard blog allows a maximum of 10 trackbacks per hour and 50 per day. We allow 50 per hour and 500 per day.

The purpose of the throttle rate is not to prevent spam, but to make sure that trackback spam doesn't overwhelm the server's ability to process requests. Regardless of whether a trackback ping is legitimate or spam, if the throttle rate is exceeded, the request is discarded before any processing starts.

For the past two days, we have been getting trackback spam at a rate of 75 pings per minute, which is completely insane. The odds of a legitimate trackback sneaking through this flood are negligible. As a result, we have changed the name of the script we use to process pings. This means that the spammer responsible for the flood will be getting Internal Server Error 500 messages instead of being counted by the trackback throttle. It also means that if you are using our Cat Lover feed or our Illinois feed, you have to go in and change the ping address.

I apologize for any inconvenience this might cause. As a conservative, I would much rather invade the offices of the spammers, imprison their leaders, and convert their families to Christianity, but due to the limited resources at my disposal, I have to settle for the liberal solution of punishing the innocent instead.

Respectfully submitted,

Ferdinand T. Cat

Trackposted to Outside the Beltway, Perri Nelson's Website, Is It Just Me?, A Blog For All, Adam's Blog, basil's blog, Stuck On Stupid, Cao's Blog, The Bullwinkle Blog, Phastidio.net, Jo's Cafe, Conservative Thoughts, Rightlinx, third world county, Woman Honor Thyself, The Crazy Rants of Samantha Burns, The Uncooperative Blogger ®, stikNstein... has no mercy, The World According to Carl, Pirate's Cove, Overtaken by Events, and Dumb Ox Daily News, thanks to Linkfest Haven Deluxe.

# At Fri 3:35 PM | Permalink | Trackback URI | Comments (2) | More Web Site News | Tags:

Trackback Pings

Comments

Yeah, Ok, whatever. Pings, trackbacks, throttle.... I know this is probably some very important stuff, but is it gonna interfere with my getting to see kitty pictures? That's what really matters


Posted by: cfomahm at March 2, 2007 7:12 PM

argg!..I hate spam!!1......thanks for the link and Happy Sunday!..:-)


Posted by: http://www.womanhonorthyself.com/ at March 3, 2007 8:19 PM

HTML is not allowed in comments; however, if you put in a raw URL (http://www.somewhere.com/page.html) it will automatically be converted to a link.. Also, it is likely your comment will not appear unless you refresh the page manually after posting it.

Post a comment