The damage of a single spam BOt.

[kgun]

I am a member of the Norwegian W3Schools forum. I have experienced that that forum has been down for a while. Yesterday I got a message starting with the following lines:

"Hello Everyone, I am excited to get the discussion board back online. I want to apologize for the length of time that it was down. I'll provide some details below if you are interested to learn more about the how and why. If not, then feel free to jump back in where you left off.

Spam
Obviously there was a bandwidth limit that was succeeded. I was able to eventually track down one major cause - a spam bot running out of India. Over 18% of our monthly bandwidth has been coming from 62.150.41.69. I've banded all request coming from that IP and now understand it is something to keep an eye out for.

Spiders
Unfortunately, the fun doesn't stop there. I was also able to determine/calculate that over 17% of the monthly bandwidth is consumed by search engine spiders - mainly yahoo, google, and microsoft. That is good for search engine positioning, but bad for bandwidth limits. I will research how to manage that better."

Over 18 % from a single spam BOT.

[crankydave]

Unfortunately, and we talked about it here on WPW previously, forums and blogs are the new favorite targets for spamming "link builders" and not directories as they once were. The amount of this kind of crap has been on a dramatic rise and I really don't see an end to it any time soon.

I even had one today that put "If you don't want this kind of message on your forum email me <here> put <this> as the subject and it will stop" in the post.

Dave