You know, I'm a pretty even-tempered guy. But when a bunch of Russian thugs attack my site with their constant barrage of spambots and then ultimately, send out solicitations on the chat panels to our users to send their email addresses in to the spammer so he'll stop spamming you, then that does it for me.

I took some actions that put the offending spammer, along with an entire continent out of reach of the IAmAWitch.Com domains.

While I won't go into the specifics of my own actions with regard to site security, I can state that with enough research and care attending to your logs, you can protect your website with a layered security approach that while not perfect, sure will discourage many a spammer or hacker from attacking your site.

It often escapes most people that there are two hemispheres to this world and that if one is in Winter, the other is in Summer. Six months later, the inverse is true.

Thus, if your Pagan site is truly adhering to the notions of this world-wide view of things, then you can spend a bit of time devoting some resources to creating a Northern Hemisphere and Southern Hemisphere seasons script for your site.

I'm going to take the example of our Seasons block here on this web and we'll go ahead and convert it over the coming week into a dual hemisphere tool, with both Northern and Southern hemispheres being represented equally.  

We've enabled the forums to start encouraging the use of this site as a primary forum and discussion area to swap stories, techniques and ideas related to website design, security and operating methods/philosophies.

In relation to this change, we opened back up the user registration system, but will be sure to investigate each user and force them to respond to us with real email responses that prove the user is real and not a spam-bot or spammer who is out to evade our checking mechanisms.

So with this in mind, we begin our little adventure with this web site - Welcome aboard! -- AJ

We have re-enabled CodeOfIsis as a working web site. Note that new user registrations are no longer permitted. If you wish to get a user account, you will need to email AJ directly. This is done by contacting him via the "register' link at the www.iamawitch.com site and then letting him know you want a CodeOfIsis account... We deleted useless submissions from some fly-by-night loan company and it just adds fuel to the fire that proves that allowing unrestricted account creation leads to abuses from idiots... We'll detail more on this in future articles...

We will be modifying this site extensively in the near future, but for now, it's just good to be back!

One of the challenges of running a web site is to pay particular attention to the log entries affecting your computer.

In my own case on the IAmAWitch.Com sites, we use a variety of packages to intercept bad entries and to deal with them.

Since most webmasters use php and mysql, this article will discuss a countermeasure for a particular type of pest called a "referrer spammer". If you look in your web server logs (or if you use, as I do, the Bad Behavior module) you might see an entry like:

Entry details

IP Address: 80.241.43.218 [ Search | Unblock IP address ]
Date: 2007-01-20 12:37:14
Reason: Prohibited header 'X-Aaaaaaaaaa' or 'X-Aaaaaaaaaaaa' present

GET /staticpages/index.php HTTP/1.1
Accept: */*
Accept-Language: en-us
Connection: Keep-Alive
Host: www.yourweb.com
Referer: http://zzzinsurance
Ua-Cpu: x86
User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; iOpus-I-M)
X-Aaaaaaaaaa: 300000
X-Aaaaaaaaaaaa: 1

Note the X-Aaaaaaaaaa content. This is telling. Also, look at the Referer and note the insurance url. This is a common tactic now in use by spammers based out of Eastern Europe. In no way should you visit the URL because it is guaranteed that your computer will be infected with a trojans, viruses and worms. I have removed the original URL and placed a non-working version into the entry to prevent any possible accidents.

I'm guilty of it myself... Not taking care of I site I built! In this case, it was to leave to take care of family in a medical emergency, and dropping the care of my site for a number of months.

And that is how a site dies... So what can be done to protect your pagan web when, as life so often throws at us, intrudes and prevents you from taking full care of your web?

NOTE: On January 20'th, this site was upgraded as a direct response to the comment spammer attacks that caused serious damage to the site.

Comment spam will now be much more difficult for a spammer to attempt to perpetrate on this web. For more details, please feel free to visit our new forums section.

What is comment spam? It is the posting, usually through help from a dedicated program, of links to sites of dubious quality and content through the use of form or CGI based variable inputs to a receiver program (in our case, the comment posting portion of the site).

Comment spam depends on the site administrator to not take actions to prevent the spam in the first place. In the case of our abuse, the spammer used an injection program to place hundreds of spam messages on the site and to cause our upgrade and add-on technology to defeat his efforts to fail on first try.

It turns out that the answer to all of this was to download the entire database and manually snip out all of the comments and then re-upload the database back to the site. On doing this, we we re able to bring the site back to full functionality.

In addition, we enabled a spam filtering utility that blocks out the messages by keyword lists, ip address, and other methods.

We also changed the site to force registration and to also manually approve new accounts to the site so as to scrutinize each new site applicant. We may relax these policies later when we have more experience with the spam prevention software, but for now, we'll be patrollling the site with more than an eye on the who/what/why of things.

Other News

We will be switching the look/feel of the site to a new header and new template set due to the upgrade. Please excuse any problems or gross errors noted during this switchover. Post any noted errors in the forums area for us - Thanks!

One of the more requested scripts that I've received letters about is how to determine the start of each of the seasons and how to display that on your site.

To this end, I discovered precious few resources to draw on, except for one lucky find at the following website:

http://www.merlyn.demon.co.uk/js-date0.htm#Sea

This site contained a number of core pieces of JavaScript logic that were immediately adaptable to our purposes of:

1. Adding an image display on the basis of the season.

2. Adding some simple text display formatting.

You can view our script in action on the left side of every page, since I've turned it into a block to display the season in the northern hemisphere.

If you are as big of a fan of the moon as I am, then you have probably scoured the web high and low for great scripts to compute lunar phases.

I have a large collection of scripts of my own, acquired over years of my travels across the web. The best scripts are the ones you can share with people and we have a script to share with you that you can adapt for text-only lunar displays on your web for your visitors to use.

This first script is quite simple to integrate into your site, simple to modify, which we will be doing in later articles (mainly to add graphics) and will bring people to your site again and again.