Why not just add a RewriteRule to your .htaccess? It's going to be quicker than running the PHP to determine if it's a spammer or not!

Well, um... , because I figure for the purposes of these forums it should be something people who use b2evolution should be able to do easily. Tweaking .htaccess is a bit outside this app ya know?

What would the .htaccess look like for that? Personally I'm afraid to tinker with that file much. A bit here and there, but NEVER have I added something I thought up by myself. Usually stuff I find and can confirm via google.

Hey!

A plugin that makes a nice interface for a user's .htaccess file would be da bomb!!! Because yeah .htaccess is the powerhouse of lightning fast spam killing. So like the templates tag, if it's still there, is a way to edit an existing file. Building a little page to write stuff based on user input isn't all that difficult, so would adding the two together be hard? For someone who knows how to use .htaccess I mean.

BTW this issue came and went. Another in a short-lived type of spam issue that would benefit from a clean answer, but doesn't need the answer for very long. I hate those. Antispam Central is FULL of stuff like that.

kwa I'll bet you got what it takes to make a plugin that can do cool tricks with .htaccess. Does it interest you?

Here is an example of a .htaccess file that should work in the case you described first (I have not tested it, however):

# .htaccess (not tested)
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /

# Block some referrer spammers
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} /\d\d\.html? [NC]
RewriteRule . [F,L]
</IfModule>

Doing it as a plugin would help some people to make it easier to filter spam. And in the case .htaccess is not supported (especially when using some other web servers than [url=http://www.apache.org]Apache[/url]) that plugin might filter referrer spammers from the PHP.

Another interesting feature would be to have a centralized regular expressions-based blacklist. (I know, you don't like to let others to choose your visitors for you. ;))

I'm going to think about it. I use [url=http://akismet.com/]Akismet[/url] on my [url=http://wordpress.org]WordPress[/url] blogs and I like the idea to centralize the antispam service. However, [url=http://akismet.com/]Akismet[/url] has huge amounts of false positives on most of my French-spoken blogs. Maybe would it be interesting to set up a competing antispam service to make competition improving the centralized antispam services? ;)

I'm going to think about it! ;)