Hosting Server does not allow pixelpost because of spammers

[visualpixel]

I just got an email from my hosting server saying that they would not allow pixelpost to run on their server. Below is the email informing why I can't run pixelpost.

Pixelpost is still having problems. Seems like some spammers have a
script setup to connect to this thing on an hourly basis and spam it.
Pixelpost doesn't do anything to stop them and it is badly written. As
you have already upgraded to the most recent version, I have no option
but to not allow pixelpost on my servers.

Sorry,

Matt Bloom
AngryHosting.com

I still want to use pixelpost but I think I might have to change servers or use a different Phoblog CMS.
Did anyone ever had this problem with pixelpost and their hosting server?

-Mark

[riken]

Dawn had the same problem. Read this topic to see how she handled it. http://www.pixelpost.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=1625

It's also been discovered that 1.4.2 doesn't fully stop referer spam: http://www.pixelpost.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=1667

My advice, check out the first link I mentioned. It has a bunch of hints on stopping spam completely.

Finally, the granddaddy for referer spam discussion is here: http://www.pixelpost.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=1252

[raminia+]

Pixelpost is very badly written?

made me laugh!

[riken]

Originally Posted by raminia

Pixelpost is very badly written?

made me laugh!

Me to, but probably not for the same reason. (Connie's gonna smack me for that one)

[raminia+]

you can avoid spammers by changing the subdomain or the directory that you installed pp. The spammers have saved your url and they keep attacking. (like my site) but the will be reduced. You can avoid that by renamining the folder that you installed pp and change the image path to the new on in pp admin panel.

[raminia+]

I wrote to them. I think they are over-caring the spam problem.

[optikal]

Originally Posted by raminia

I wrote to them. I think they are over-caring the spam problem.

I don't think so. I can't allow one user's PHP script and SQL database to use up 2 of my 4 processors. It didn't take much diagnosis to determine that the problem was within the referral code sending all the requests straight to the database. Do you think spammers care what they're doing to the server? No. Basically, I was noticing that on an hourly basis, multiple Pixelpost blogs were being slammed with connections. At times, I would see over a thousand connections to visualpixel's database. Of course, this causes extreme load in MySQL, makes queries for EVERYONE slower, causes the CPU to be overrun, which makes access slower for everyone. If visualpixel were paying for a dedicated server, so be it.. let Pixelpost take the thing down; but he is not. As a business owner, you have to make sure that the best interests of ALL your clients are being met. Is it in the best interest of my clients who do not even know about Pixelpost to have their site access slowed down because of one or two users? No. Is it in my best interest to make sure this doesn't happen? Yes.

That being said, I have given visualpixel a chance to secure the site and prevent this from happening. I had him upgrade from 1.4.0 to 1.4.1 which didn't solve the problem. Now that I see there are indeed work arounds (ie. commenting out the referral function call altogether), he is welcome to do that and continue running the software as long as I can be assured that it won't be used as a DOS any longer.

[raminia+]

I got a very gentle reponse from the host with good suggestions.
Right now I'm testing http://www.ioerror.us/software/bad-behavior/ .

[raminia+]

@optikal, I do understand your concerns.

- in 1.4.2 we put ref page inside the admin page. This way the spammer bots dont' find pp as a good place to attack. but it works with new PP sites or old PP sites with modified URL.

- in 1.4.2 there are two added addons.
1) advance Stat addon that cleans up visitors tables each month and summerize it into a stat table with just keeping very small amount of data.

- I'm working on Matt Bloom suggestion from AngryHosting.com. Is that you?

- If you don't mind take a look at other forum discussion about bad-behavior
http://www.pixelpost.org/forum/viewt...?p=11186#11186
and the addon from that to avoid ref spammers.

[visualpixel]

Thanks for the help guys. I'm going to try out some of the advice from the forum discussions you guys directed me to and hopefully it'll stop all the spamming. I'll let you know how it goes. I've been pretty busy so there might be a delay with my response. Again thanks for all the help, I appreciate all the hard work and time you put into the development of pixelpost.