Lifhaus is the social networking site I spent hours building. It is still a work in progress but most of its internal structures are already in place. As for my lofty ambitions to simulate Facebook; well I have to admit I have neither the time nor the money to build a site like Facebook. Secondly, I hope that as Drupal matures into a CMS fully integrated with social networking capabilities, Lifhaus will then follow suit. But the basic components of a social networking site is there. User profiles, photo album per user, facebook like status and among a few other small bits and pieces, a discussion board. However, what I really would like to achieve is getting people to contribute content such as news and stories. That is a concept that is still difficult to sell and would probably need more publicity.
But the scourge of the internet is here and Lifhaus has had to bear the brunt of a weekend of spamming. We have been spammed since the site began but none more prominent than over the last weekend.
10 odd pages of spam were generated, that is equivalent to 300 spam contents in 3 days. The spamming would occur in spurts over a time period over the weekend. Our monitoring logs showed 3 anonymous bots consistently hitting Lifhaus and generating spam. IP lookup showed a range from China, the US and Thailand. Every few hours the IP would change to Russia, US and another Asian country perhaps illustrating that it is the same source but masking its true IP address.
Lifhaus uses Drupal’s Spam module and this module uses an assorted range of filters to determine if a posted content is spam. It is able to do this by training itself over a period of time. Regular Lifhaus contributors have suffered the consequences as it has driven people away when it mistakenly flags a legitimate content as spam. The feedback option does allow users to inform Admin that they have been incorrectly flagged but it does require extra effort and one most users are not willing to do.
This blog uses WP-Spamfree which has worked like a charm but because it blocks content deemed spam silently, I am interested in knowing if it has blocked any legitimate content. But the beauty about WP-Spamfree for WordPress is that it goes about doing its job and you are left to providing the content. I do hope Drupal initiates work to get this great little WordPress module available as another Drupal alternative. Having said that, I believe the arrival of Mollom and its promises may make the Drupal gods ignore WP-Spamfree.
The attacks have abated. This morning there were only 75 spam in the queue all of which have since been deleted. Perhaps monitoring or policing Facebook and ensuring its integrity is a nightmare. No doubt there is an expensive piece of software bearing the load but no one can deny that significant time, effort and money has been put into place to achieve such serenity on the web.
People have asked me why? What do spammers get out of this? Honestly, I cannot say I know anymore – its robotic after all and a robot has no conscience, has no objective; it just crawls/trawls all over the Internet and spews its garbage on every possible weak link it finds.