Sorry to be a complete boring swot but I’ve blocked some more IP addresses. These IP addresses, some of which are owned by ChinaNet, have been hammering this site and frankly I just wasn’t going to take it any more.

I previously barred access to the site for small parts of the 124.115 block, thinking I had fixed the spam problem. However it turns out that the site is still receiving a large number of requests from IPs in this range, usually reporting an agent like Internet Explorer 6, and always declaring the referrer as http://nitrocandy.com and then, almost immediately afterwards,  http://www.nitrocandy.com.

I’m starting to think the whole block is rotten.

I spent some time looking around for who might be behind the 124.115 block, and it seems that at least part of the IP block is owned by a comment harvester. Another part of the block seems to be owned by a mail spammer.

Despite the large number of requests, part of the block may be legitimate. This blog post says that part of the IP block is reported by Sosospider. A disobedient spider, to be sure, but ostensibly above board.

For the moment, I’m barring the whole block.