For the last week the server has been under siege by the spammers. Before I activated the automatic reject setting, my email was flooded with 1500 or so moderation requests. Chances are anyone trying to comment over the weekend or earlier met the emergency comment shutdown mode in Serendipity for those occassions when the spammers are in overdrive. To ease off the restrictions I’ve bumped up the required delay between comments, added some additional search terms, and removed the emergency shutdown option – it’s just preventing comments from legitimate users at this stage.

Sort of while doing this I also took a look at another highlighted issue – bots. The number and frequency of bots crawling the blog and forums has increased a great deal since the start of the year. Normally I don’t mind search bots, but a few of these are hitting again, and again, and again. Now checking in is normal – but what’s all the multiple daily hits about? How many times is the blog being downloaded a day at the expense of sucking up my personal paid for bandwidth?