Spammed to death

After years of neglect I’ve been mucking around in the guts of my website. I have a book chapter due, so of course any activity besides that needs immediate attention. There are some message boards I created in the late 90’s – when such things were rare and cool, that have been getting spammed by robots. One of them had accumulated 52 MB of text referencing viagra, drugs, and pornography in every way imaginable. The first 731 lines of text were conversation from 1998 about story writing, followed by 278,000 lines of SPAM. I decided to remove the spam and turn off the ability to add new posts, and found that I hadn’t modifed the code in nearly ten years! According to the logs, one of the message boards had received 1700 posts in 12 hours from 49 unique IP addresses.

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