WhyNot

Ok, thanks again. The “Deny from…” .htaccess thing certainly did the trick. No more of that idiot’s SPAM bombardment.

If I may ask one more question, where should I go to find out more about this .htaccess file – what it can do, the syntax, etc?

I’m sorry I’m so clueless. A friend of mine installed WordPress for me and has taught me the very basics so that I could maintain the site, but I’m definitely not a pro.

Philippe

Otto42,

The strangest thing is that once I renamed the file on the site itself, just out of curiosity, I thought “let’s try FTPing back to my PC”, and W2K didn’t blink an eye.

In fact I was able to open the local copy with UltraEdit (a text/hex editor), and again W2K didn’t mind in the least.

Go figure, eh!

Interesting you mention XP allows a ‘no-name’ file to be created whereas W2K doesn’t (at least not on my desktop PC).

I have 2 notebooks which have XP on them, so if I ever need to do that kind of trick again, I’ll keep it in mind.

By the way, the good news is that it’s now been some 12 hours that the flood of SPAM has stopped completely.

I’m still not 100% sure the problem is fixed because that idiot would flood my blog but not all day long. It was like 2 or 3 times a day, nothing happening in between, but when he got started, it was pouring by the bucketful.

But it’s now been around 12 hours without his SPAM, so I’m starting to feel that the trick is working.

Many thanks again to you and DianeV ??
Philippe

PS: I’ll have to find out more about what else this .htaccess file can do.

Thanks Otto42.

I followed your instructions, and after entering the “Deny from 64.92.164.138” line, saved that “news text document.txt” file.

However when I went to rename it to “.htaccess”, W2K yelled loudly telling me “you must enter a filename”.

On the other hand, just out of curiosity, I FTP’ed the text file to the blog anyway, and then, within the FTP program, tried to rename the file on the site itself, and it accepted the change of name. I think the site runs on Unix.

So, I’ll see if it does the trick.

I will also investigate the “Bad Behavior” and “Akismet” plug-ins.

Thank you for the help!

Hey DianeV,

Thank you so much for replying. I have heard of this .htaccess file before, but never fiddled with it and confess complete ignorance.

Using FTP, I looked around the site but can’t seem to find it. I went into subdirectories, poked around everywhere but no luck.

I also tried looking in the “Admin” section of WordPress itself, but again, no luck.

Would you be so kind as to give me the basic clues on how to go about accessing/editing this “magic” .htaccess file?

Is it simply a case that it doesn’t exist until I create one? But if so, how can one create in W2K a file that doesn’t have a nme, but only an extension?

Thank you again for your response. This guy is driving me bonkers.
Philippe