Does your raw access log display a host name of “0”, or zero? Very odd, is it not? I have been struggling with this for a couple of months, and my ISP Site5 had no answers. It turns out that one of my spammers, NFORCE_ENTERTAINMENT, puts an unprintable character into their host table, so that when my ISP looks them up, they display the unprintable character in my log as “0”.
Trying to control your site’s spam can be challenging. If you try to ban an IP that is simply 0, or a host name of “0” you will fail, because there is no zero in their host name, but an unprintable character. Ban these guys instead.
The march of time stops for no one, rich or poor, for whomever. While humans may be able to mitigate their demise with a bit of compassion, there is none for old phones. Android phones grow old, older than 2 years old, slow down, and then get pitched into the back drawer, replaced by a new Android model, never to be turned on again.
After a long while your htaccess might get a tad long. My favourite htaccess checker only processes files up to 5,000 lines. Often this is due to lots of comments, which I encourage. Let us cover some ways you can shorten your htaccess:
Combine your user agents/referrers
If you have multiple user agent or referrers that have similar names, combine them into a single statement,
from:
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^.*Blackboard\ Safeassign [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^.*BlackWidow [OR]
to:
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^.*Black(board\ Safeassign|Widow) [OR]
Bought yesterday, I did, a Starfrit Spiralizer. Since Little Weed wanted to see how it worked his first choice, of course, was french fries.
Spiralized white potato was really simple to do. It looks but does not taste like pasta spaghetti. Photo by Don Tai, Toronto, Canada
I used the smallest shoestring blade, the spaghetti size, which turned out to be too small. Potatoes need a larger sized tube. It took only 8 minutes in my deep fryer but came out acceptably. There are shoestring french fry recipies out there that are baked rather than deep fried. I’ll try that next.
Rare, is my visits to Rona Home and Garden Store, here in Scarborough, Toronto, Canada, at Midland near Steeles. While they are pretty clean and almost all the sales associates speak Mandarin, close by there is also the Home Depot Head Office store, as well as Lowes.
Starfrit Spriralizer cuts veg into long and thin spaghetti, on sale at Cantire for $20, Walmart regular price $26, Rona regular price $23. Rona grudgingly price matched Cantire and then beat them by an additional 10 percent. Yay, but laborious to remind Rona staff of their online policy.
no-ptr.as20860.net is a dual Ip spammer with a twist. The originating IP hostname lookup returns three IPs! You’ll need to ban all three, but there’s a lot more. They use IOMart, GB as their ISP.
It seems like this hostname also morphs to numerous IP addresses, making them difficult to track down.
Method:
no-ptr.as20860.net not only uses the dual ip spammer strategy, but also changes its host name through many ip addresses, making it double difficult to ban.
fvds.ru spammed me, so I researched them. A good portion of their IPs are in the range of 62.109.24.0/24 but there are others. They use a wide variety of names.
Observation:
t-testing.fvds.ru host lookup 62.109.2.78 is bogus. Research revealed 62.109.24.26 and 62.109.24.27.
Difficult it was, this afternoon, after 7 days of Googlebot crawl error 500s, but I am learning. One htaccess regex line error was the cause. Hopefully it will go away.
I tried to compress some HTTP_USER_AGENT mod rewrite rules in my htaccess, into a single line, in order to shorten my htaccess, from:
static.vdc.vn is regular content scraper, but it did POST to me and left its IP address. I have been trying to track this one down for a while, but it uses such a wide variety of IP addresses that this is difficult. I could ban large ranges but this would also ban a wide swath of Vietnam, which I do not wish.
