I’ve been flexing the techie brain muscles today. About two days ago I got some comment spam, the usual stuff – vlagra etc.
However this morning it was getting a bit more offensive so I decided to have a play around with a few things. Now just to note, many of the bits and pieces used on this site are experimental so when it first went live, instead of putting in place measures to stop spam in the first place, I decided to open the site up and see what came in.
On the whole it’s been quite encouraging that very little has got through. However, after a bit of techie investigation I tracked down the offending spam to two sources, one in Holland and the other in Poland. Suffice to say, a bit of work on the ‘.htaccess’ file (anyone who knows Apache will be very familiar with this wonderful little file) and all seems well again. Trace routes are returning to normal and bringing up proper visitors instead of spam bots and I’m all the happier.
However in my investigation I was quite interested to see a few other titbits. Apparently the search term in Google for ‘Peter Francis Walsall Council’ has netted me rather a lot of visitors and at the last check I was 6th on Google for this search term. There are also an alarming number of people interested in ‘knuckle dusters’ visiting my site, either their procurement or checking out their legal status in the UK. But the one I like the most was by someone from the House of Commons who found my site looking for a blog by the MP for Stourbidge, Lynda Waltho. I’m afraid it doesn’t reside here and if you’re interested, here’s her website. However, you won’t find a blog there, in fact you won’t find much at all there.