I’m not just a blogger.  I’m a web host.  I own, manage and operate multiple web servers that provide service to individuals and corporations.  This fact implores me to take action against the bad guys: the scrapers and the spammers and the scammers and the hackers and the nefarious individuals and groups who continually look for ways to fuck you up on the web.

So it’s with great pleasure that I declare my personal war against such cretins with a return to my technological roots, a new ongoing series of posts about how to overcome this collective group of assholes.

Why am I doing this?  It all started…  When I had to get up every damn morning and filter through hundreds of spam comments.  I can’t tell you how many days went by when I would simply dump the queue because I didn’t feel like spending that amount of time reading everything marked as spam.

Yes, good stuff got thrown out with the bad stuff.  Oh well…

But during those rarely short but often long sessions, I began to see patterns.  And those patterns helped me create a different kind of bullshit shield, one that now provides value-added service to my hosting clients.

Yet it’s a complicated issue, from browser sniffing (something Opera decries, and shame on them for being so supportive of the bad guys) to IP correlation (when does a server deserve to connect with a web browser User-Agent?) to proxy denial (rare is the valid user who connects through a proxy).

Truth be told, from the likes of Hashlog Ltd. to Kevin Duraj, the dicks are aplenty and the defenses are few.  So I’m going to help you by showing you how to identify the riffraff and how to kill the crap that’s clogging your inbox, your time and your attention.

Now is for smart people to kill this crap and make the web more amenable to regular users.

Oh, and as a final note, China: Clean up your fucking act!  Your IP space is terrible.  Most people of sound mind will block your entire nation without thinking twice.  Instead of telling me that 121.124.0.0 – 121.125.255.255 belongs to some obscure and indecipherable Chinese telecom company, split that shit out and tell me who the hell owns that massive address space.  Otherwise—and I can assure you of this—the entire fucking world will block your asses and leave your country to its own firewalled demise.