stblogs.org was down for part of Wednesday because of a problem at our web hosting provider. Apparently the spammers trying to stick their ads into the comments and the trackback entries were being blocked by our Movable Type MT-Blacklist plugin, but they still imposed a heck of a performance burden on the web server.
The folks at our hosting provider understandably enough wanted to take action. However, they shut down the whole stblogs.org site, rather than the one program the spammers were trying to use -- and without telling me. I hope I can get some commitment from them not to do that again.
I've set up an automated routine to watch the logs for IP addresses that use the trackback and comment routines heavily, and block them from access to the site. That should cut down the performance problem adequately. In the process, though, I accidentally blocked some of the authors from posting, but most of them are back on the OK list now.
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