Dealing with spam from privacy-protected domains.

June 10, 2011 5:02 PM

How do I deal with an spam-ey domain name that is hidden with privacy protection?

The company that does the privacy protection won't help me since they're not spamming over email (they're flooding a message board and managing to bypass the captcha)

The privacy protection company itself is hidden with privacy protection, so there is no way to contact them other than the form they have on their page.

The spam came from the Russia, the privacy protection company is in Australia, and I'm in the United States. I'm not sure i'd have any legal pull anyway.

Anything I can do other than ramp up are-you-human measures or block the entire country of Russia (temporary measure...)?

posted by gameshints to computers & internet (7 answers total)

The solution is to block the ip address(es) that designate the domain name. You should be able to accomplish this by inserting code into your .htaccess file--take a look here.
posted by lobbyist at 5:51 PM on June 10, 2011

My Wordpress site was hacked by somebody in Indonesia a couple of weeks ago. I blocked the IP address back to the first two octets. Not sure how much I really blocked but traffic to the blog hasn't really changed.
posted by COD at 7:04 PM on June 10, 2011

Not sure what forum platform you're running, but in PHPBB at least it is very easy to block domains or entire IP blocks, not to mention implement stronger spam prevention methods.

I would look to those options first.
posted by Elminster24 at 7:10 PM on June 10, 2011

Are there any legal/political solutions, or are my only options going to be technical?
posted by gameshints at 11:13 PM on June 10, 2011

You're hoping for a legal solution for a problem involving three countries, one of which is Russia? Utterly hopeless.
posted by jon1270 at 5:16 AM on June 11, 2011 [1 favorite]

Agreed with jon1270. You should think about this in terms of resource requirements and results (assuming you are just looking for results and are not trying to be vengeful).

Q: What does it take to pursue legal/political solutions?
A: An TON of money for lawyers and lobbyists and a LOT of time.
Result: Maybe take down one spam domain and watch 10 more pop up in its place to do the same thing--except now they just want to piss you off.

Q: What does it take to pursue a technical solution?
A: A little bit of code, or tweaking some settings, perhaps a developer if you are not technical. Not very much time either way.
Result: An easy way to block problem domains/IPs/IP blocks/Countries and no more spam or at least significantly reduced spam.
posted by Elminster24 at 9:39 AM on June 11, 2011

Had the same problem - check out: httpbl.
posted by bhance at 6:46 PM on June 12, 2011