ReverseDOS Spam Filter Preliminary Analysis

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I posted earlier about the fantastic ReverseDOS anti-spam filter that I installed on my site to try and cut down on the wasted bandwidth/clock cycles incoming spam attempts were still chewing up; the preliminary results are looking very promising (I haven’t had a single spam comment since I installed it), and my bandwidth usage is down by about 30%. So, I’m re-enabling trackbacks (which by far and away is where most of the junk was coming from…I’d say a ratio of about 20:1 over comment spam) and we’ll see if it’s really working. I’ll give it either:

Until Friday, or
Until I get my first big batch of trackback spam

And then I’ll post about the results. Overall at this point I’m extremely impressed with this utility, and haven’t noticed any performance issues on the server it’s installed on. This thing is a godsend.

Posted Tue, Jan 17 2006 6:11 PM by Jayson Knight

Filed under: Tools and Resources, Site News

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Comments

Keyvan Nayyeri wrote re: ReverseDOS Spam Filter Preliminary Analysis

on Wed, Jan 18 2006 7:46 AM

Still I'm thinking to find good methods. Probably will design a webservice!

Erik Lane wrote re: ReverseDOS Spam Filter Preliminary Analysis

on Thu, Jan 19 2006 1:47 AM

I've found ReverseDOS to be awesome. Installed it a while back and have never looked back. I guess one side affect is if you want to talk about "filtered topics" comments may get lost. Take a look at Haacks recent posts.

Jayson Knight wrote re: ReverseDOS Spam Filter Preliminary Analysis

on Thu, Jan 19 2006 1:54 AM

It's funny you should mention it; he and I just had an email conversation earlier today about that exact topic. I'm just using the default .config file that shipped w/ RDOS (I figured I'd add filters when spams start slipping through). I think the filter that's doing the brunt of the work is the one not allowing more than 4 hrefs in a comment. I just emailed Mike Campbell requesting that logging be added to a future version so we can see which filters are performing the best. But yes, so far it's working brilliantly and I'm very pleased. I'll have some hard data up soon.

Michael K. Campbell wrote re: ReverseDOS Spam Filter Preliminary Analysis

on Thu, Jan 19 2006 2:39 AM

the 4 hrefs filter is just a default. It's a standard regex which you can override (or increas e it) by changing the matchCount attribute in the config file. take a look at http://www.angrypets.com/tools/rdos/configure.aspx and http://www.angrypets.com/tools/rdos/docs.aspx for more info...

Erik Lane wrote re: ReverseDOS Spam Filter Preliminary Analysis

on Thu, Jan 19 2006 10:11 AM

Logging would be very cool. I added in some more filters after I initially set it up but nothing more. Thanks Mike for providing more info on the configuration. It works so well I've not needed anything more I guess.

Jayson Knight wrote re: ReverseDOS Spam Filter Preliminary Analysis

on Thu, Jan 19 2006 10:32 AM

I agree w/ Eric, the default configuration works great, which is what I meant in my comment: the majority of spams coming in have a shedload of links in them...anything over 4-5 is probably spam, so more than likely that filter is the one doing the most work, but that's why I'd love a logging mechanism...to see which filters are doing the best job. Logging to a DB would kind of defeat the purpose of RDOS IMO as it would take quite a bit of resources to do this, a simple text file would be fine for me, though perhaps a simple log reader to wade through the results. Regardless, it's the (lack of) resource consumption that makes this utility great, so if any type of logging were to be implemented, it should follow that paradigm.