Nebulous

With the increasing amount of spam I’ve been getting, including human entered spam, I’ve decided to forego IP/CIDR bans in .htaccess that I’ve been using in favour of a PHP script solution in order to make the site more efficient.

A scripted solution is more flexible as it can do access analysis, it can prevent an .htaccess file from becoming too large and unwieldy (mine were in the 30k to 40k range!) and can act proactively against threats, which is far better than my reactive process of adding IPs and networks to the .htaccess only after an event has occurred.

I’m also hoping that this scripted solution is going to keep my error log files down in size.  With .htaccess, every file that a banned IP/network attempts to access results in a “403 forbidden” line being written to the server log and that can really add up.   With the security script acting as gate keeper and maintaining its own easy-to-read “plain English” log files,  log entries are kept segregated and the server’s error log is kept smaller.

I’m currently testing out ZB Block since it appears to be one of the scripted security solutions that’s quite easy for a non-programmer/scripter to integrate with my existing sites.

So far, the integration has gone smoothly and without any conflicts at present and I’m anxious to see what the logs will contain after a week in operation.