I second cached pageviews being doubled

OK. Do you believe that the second caching will solve the issue with the comment spam? Here's a communication that I received from the hosting service after midnight last night:

************************************************************
System administration was tracking a CPU spike on the server which houses your account which has been traced back to the same issue which occurred earlier today. Due to comment spam, the account used an amount of CPU resources 2.7x higher than the safe maximum. To allow you to continue working to correct the problem without re-suspending the account, this was added to your .htaccess file as a temporary solution:

ErrorDocument 503 "Comment posting temporarily unavailable"
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} /htsrv/comment_post.php
RewriteRule .* - [R=503,L]
*************************************************************

I noted that it's described as a "temporary solution" from their end and I'm not sure if it applies to my last post or to all the posts. I'm just seeking a firm understanding of what can be done to eliminate this problem.

Thanks

abuzz wrote:

I noted that it's described as a "temporary solution" from their end and I'm not sure if it applies to my last post or to all the posts. I'm just seeking a firm understanding of what can be done to eliminate this problem.

Thanks

That should disable commenting on all posts, it's not the ideal way to do it, you could disable comments from backoffice as well but that should also do the trick.

b2 usually doesnt attract that much spam comments (unlike WP), and i dont fancy that much (thousands ?) comments are human submitted, although they might be :D Those comment spamming bastards are working hard.. All in all, you or your server might be a target for some reason, either it's bot or human submitted, first step of action should be disabling comments or in my opinion at least setting them to be moderated.
Check for a specific ip, email, domain, keyword pattern for the spam and block them accordingly.

You should upgrade to version 4 as it's a harder target for spam bots. Version 5 will be even harder. 30% of ou developments for the last 3 years revolve around the spam issue. It really makes sense to keep up with the latest versions for this.

@tilqicom~Thanks for the info regarding blocking the spam according to keyword or url. I blacklisted numerous urls/keywords during the past couple of days, eliminating at least a couple of hundred thousand comments. What's standing out is that the day prior to beginning that process my global hits total was 24462. Since then the totals have been 10553, 8726 and then 7702 yesterday. Can you explain the correlation? Also, you mentioned that you second cached the pageviews that were doubled. I've been averaging a little over a thousand pageviews a day for my latest post and I'm wondering if that's relatively accurate now.

@fplanque~Thank you for your feedback as well regarding my recent inquiries. I have considered upgrading but I'm concerned about running into complications and messing with the look of the blog. Also I don't want to risk having any extended down time for the site. If it's a simple process that takes little time and everything remains the same except for enhanced performance and security, great. But I have an extremely busy schedule and I need to keep things as simple and convenient as possible.

Thanks for your help guys!

abuzz, your blog seems to run a fairly standard skin. Upgrade should be absolutely smooth sailing. Also any time spent on upgrading you will benefit every day from extra security / antispam and new features.

You should definitely schedule a couple of hours every 6 months for an upgrade.

@fplanque~OK, thanks for the info