On Tue, Feb 16, 2010 at 2:31 PM, Domas Mituzas midom.lists@gmail.comwrote:
Presumably some percentage of that 20-50% will come back as the spammers realize they have to supply the string. Presumably we then start playing whack-a-mole.
Yes, we will ban all IPs participating in this.
Guess it's just a matter of time until *reading* Wikipedia is unavailable to large portions of the world.
Presumably there's a plan for what to do when the spammers begin
supplying a new, random string every time.
Random strings are easy to identify, fixed strings are easy to verify.
And "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT http://whatsmyuseragent.com/CommonUserAgents.asp#5.1)", is pretty much useless, unless you've already identified the spammer through some other process.
(I do worry about where this is going, though.)
Going where it always goes, proper operations of the website. Been there, done that.
Do any of the other major websites completely block traffic when they see blank user agents?