I have one blog post on this site that, because it refers to phpBB, was constantly bombarded with spam comments.  I managed to stop the comments by using JavaScript code to submit the form - which reduces accessibility, but does the job for now.

Whilst this stops spam-bots from successfully submitting comments, it doesn't stop them from trying and last month the page was viewed 5188 times.

Because I had accidentally blocked Bloglines from my site in the past (because it's IP was so prominent on my site stats) I wanted to work out a method to identify true spam-bots and not accidentally block legitimate users.  The spam-bots only pick on this one page, so I wrote a PHP scripts that analysed my raw log file and displays all the IP's that viewed that page and how many times they viewed it.

But even then I couldn't be sure that the highest ranking IP's were really spam-bots, and then I found Spamhaus.  It's a service specifically for email protection, but I suspect many spammers who post comments on web sites are the same spammers who send emails, and you can easily look up an IP to see if Spamhaus has identified it as a source of spam.  And wouldn't you know, 195.225.177.131 which was responsible for 2991 hits on my site last month, was identified as a source of spam.

It's nice to have a procedure and a resource such as Spamhaus to help identify sources of spam.