[wp-testers] Aksimet banning?

[Travis Snoozy]

On Mon, 04 Jun 2007 13:30:47 +1000, Jeremy Visser
<jeremy.visser at gmail.com> wrote:

> Andy Holtzmann wrote:
> > hey I am not sure how else to get a hold of such an open-to-idea
> > group of Automattic developers. this isn't really for WP but for
> > akismet. what if you had the option of banning ip that are caught
> > as spam. not a definite "oh you spamed me" but you know your friend
> > comments with links to make a point, so Akismet catches it. but
> > just a way to automatically ban spam bots and what not.
> 
> You mean, like adding whitelists and blacklists? Perhaps a bozo-type
> (ref: bbPress) approach by bozo'ing IP addresses would help.

Initially, I thought this would be a good idea, too -- to just totally
ban the IP addresses that were spamming me -- and I did this manually
for a while (though I forget how I was accomplishing this). However,
what I've found is that spam comes from so many different addresses,
banning by IP is pretty ineffective. I have only had a handful of spam
comments come from the same address, and that's usually within the same
batch. I don't know what the overhead is like for checking IPs against
a list before allowing/disallowing a post, but my guess is that the
cost of maintaining a huge list of IPs and checking that list per-post
is going to cost more CPU & memory than it's worth.

Just my $0.02, though. :)

-- 
Travis