User Comments

Cool. But your main complaint seems to be that you lose bandwidth to the spammer when they get your 404 page… How do you choose to react to this? By serving an 11KB image!

So what have you achieved?

Taking this a little further, I realise one more flaw in your actions. You are presenting a visual message to an imaginary spammer who you assume is manually looking at your crappy website for the form script. This wouldn’t happen because the spammers don’t visit your website as such. They use automated tools to scan urls for whatever it is that they want to exploit. So they are never even going to see your “open letter”. Get a life.

“How do you choose to react to this? By serving an 11KB image!”

Obviously, I thought about that before I created my message. For each “message” I serve an 11Kb image and a few bytes of HTML. For each 404 page, I serve 14KB of HTML, 15KB of CSS and 27KB of images (56KB in total) - a saving of around 80%. Seems like a win to me.

“So what have you achieved?”

1. The spammer gets my subtle message, I get my point across.
2. Because I’m serving a request successfully, my error log doesn’t fill up with 404’s.
3. I get immense pleasure from finding an excuse to use gratuitous images of sexy girls and offensive language on my website.
4. I get extra traffic on my website when people email the link to their friends.
5. I get people like you posting comments on here and thus making my website look like it’s more popular than it really is.

“…the spammers don’t visit your website as such. They use automated tools to scan urls for whatever it is that they want to exploit. So they are never even going to see your ‘open letter’.”

Oh well, I guess the whole exercise was just a waste of time then. Actually TJ, I agree with you, to a point. Yes, the spammer is likely to use software in his hunt for formmail.pl. His software is likely to query hundreds of thousands of domains looking for the script. Some of those domains will respond with a 404 error - and the spammer knows not to bother going there.

Some, however, will respond with a status of “200” - or success. Which is what will happen when my formmail.pl is hit. The spammer just might visit at this point and get my message. More likely though is that my domain will simply be added to a database for a subsequent bulk-emailing effort.

This is where I’m hoping to cause the spammer just a little bit of grief. His mailing script could possibly crash when it tries to send email through my formmail.pl, at the very least it should generate errors. The spammer may, or may not investigate - if he does, he’ll get my message. If he doesn’t, I couldn’t care less.

Either way, I escape unscathed. Again, a win!

Your a wanker.

That’s true.

Personally I find the picture quite amusing… BTW, who’s the chick in the pic?

hmmm, just noticed that this is months old, you’ll probably never see this comment… oh well..

I have no idea who she is, it’s just an image I came across on the web. She’s cute though! :-)

BTW, I see every comment!

I take it you’re notified of new comments regardless of how old the blog entry is. That or you get really bored and everyday you check every old blog entry for new comments. Though, I guess, you might get some sorta weird feeling that you should check a for new comments when there is a new one posted….

:-)

There’s no trick. I’m not a psychic or anything. The CMS sends me an email notifiying me of all new comments, just so that I don’t miss anything that needs a response.

Funny how all the people who insulted you are anonymous. Probably spammers themselves.

I like what you did - it would be nice to think of a few spammer scripts crashing here and there.

If you want to save bandwidth you could just change that file to a zero-byte one - it would still be served as a ‘200’ code and ‘maybe’ crash their script.

Funny how all the people who insulted you are anonymous.

Yeah, that’s hilarious. :-)

you could just change that file to a zero-byte one - it would still be served as a ‘200’ code

Appreciated. But where’s the fun in that? ;-)

I checked my 404 logs and found quite a few errors looking for known holes as well as formmail.pl (I renamed that one years ago) and I copied your file for each one of the attempts. Except for the image I linked a really big file from NASA. Hope they like it.

Ha, ha… I like that webweave. A nice, big download from NASA - who says spamming can’t be educational eh?