Blocking Chinese spammers

One of the sites I work on, Songwriter101, has been experiencing problems in the forums- Chinese drive-by spammers.  The forum moderators had been deleting posts for weeks by users called shoesnew, Hu, ch, shoeman and the like.  They were all posting about the same topic- deals on sneakers, athletic wear, etc.

My team was pulling out their hair.  “Of all things… why shoes?? Do these spammers think that songwriters have a thing for purchasing new shoes? I could understand if they were spamming guitar strings or something, but shoes???”

I asked if there were any good deals.. and then knew I had to deliver a solution.  After playing the cat and mouse game for some time with suspending the userids and banning the IPs, it was time for something more drastic.

A quick Google search pulled up a great site with complete IP blocks in several formats.  A bit of htaccess tweakery with the CIDR files and now, we’re Chinese spam-free! 

(I’m quite proud of the ”error message.")

From the moderators: “And… today is the first day all week of spam-free moderating. Thank you!!  ...enjoy the absence of sneaker ads.”