Stuart Herbert | Gentoo

Unless the spammers have also been enjoying a break from things over the holiday period, the collection of anti-spam additions for b2evolution that I recently put together has been doing a great job. I’ve only had one spammer get through so far - a definite improvement over recent times

I’ve put together a first release of the antispam patch collection. None of this code is my original work; I’ve just collected these patches from the b2evolution forums and made them available in one, easy-to-apply patch. Full credit for the original authors is included in the README file in the tarball.

Once I’ve caught up with Daniel (who maintains Gentoo’s b2evolution package), I hope to get this patch included as standard on Gentoo. I’d rather resist making this optional; I’m sure everyone using b2evo to run their blog (like all the Gentoo-hosted dev blogs) should have stronger antispam as standard.

I think that there’s still room for improvement. So far, I haven’t seen b2evolution itself do anything with the IP addresses that spam comes from. Blacklisting the IP addresses locally, and submitting them to a central blacklist like bsb.empty.us could be useful. Then, updating the spam recheck, deny access for referer spammers and bad behaviour add-ins to also update the IP blacklists could be very useful The zombie boxes relaying the spam all seem to post a wide range of spam; being able to identify and block them as early as possible may cut down on the spam that does get through.

Now, if only we could actually do something useful about all these zombie boxes that the spam is relayed through …