spamming the blog listing services

so as i’m cleaning up and optimizing blo.gs, i’ve stumbled across a huge set of spammed entries that came in via weblogs.com. this particular bunch will be easy to block going forward, and it inspired yet another couple of ping-spamming defenses.

one of the things i’m working on is doing better logging of some things so that i can more easily run reports that will show the statistical outliers. for example, most IP addresses only ping blo.gs a few times a day, at most. so addresses that do more than that are ripe for investigation.

also, since all updates are now going through a common function, i don’t need to worry about updating rules to handle direct pings as well as information imported from weblogs.com and blogger.com.

i’m taking advantage of some nifty new features of mysql 4.1 to optimize some bits of the site, like b-tree indexes on in-memory tables. i’ve also converted everything over so that the database realizes that it is storing utf-8 data.

so the site is back up, and hopefully won’t need to be taken down for as long a period as it was today, at least for a while. i hope i’m done with the schema changes to the main blogs table, though. it takes about 20 minutes to rebuild the table each time i change the schema.