[spam-stopper] 404 to spam!

[Rubén Marrero]

Hi all:

I've been dealing with spam on my blog with a variety of techniques  
that I would like to comment and receive feedback on:

I'm combing the comment database every hour and harvesting unique IPs  
that Akismet (or myself) have flagged as spam.

Those IP addrs. get added to a DB file; Apache knows about this file  
and checks it with every invocation of wp-comment.php, if the IP is  
in the file, then t's presented with a 404 error page. End of story.  
That IP is forever banned to post comments in my blog.

I host my blog (http://bitacoreando.com) in a VPS, and a fairly small  
one at that, and I found that even though Akismet was flagging spam  
comments correctly, any smallish spam-storm would bring my VPS to  
it's knees. This solution has restored control over the resource  
usage of my WP install and since last december it has allowed me  
breathe easily.

I could hack my Akismet install to update the DB as soon as it has  
received a response from the central server, but I thought that maybe  
this feature could be discussed and maybe integrated into the main  
devel line of this plugin. What do you think?

I also have collected all the hourly cron jobs since dec. 21 and the  
actual DB file, all in all it's a lot of spammer's IP information  
that might be useful, so if anyone wants it, just say so

Best
Rubén