Spam as DoS

The server here handles several WordPress weblogs. I have Akismet running, so they weren’t filling up with spam being served. What I hadn’t realized was just how much bandwidth and resources spammers were sucking out of the server. Reed Cartwright and I worked on the issue last night. Reed got a per-IP connection limiting module working with lighttpd, and I installed a basic “captcha” plugin for the various WordPress installations on the server. Sorry to make entering comments a little more difficult, but the spamming traffic was making it hard for real users to get near sites served from here.