Just some discussion on this phenomenon, which seems to be spreading like wildfire these days. My site's guestbook has been filling up with spam for wuite a while now. To counter it, I have now created a script which auto-adds the IP-address of any user posting a message containing 'not-words' (phentermine, viagra, you know the $#!t) to a banlist. Also, all entries which have a referral different than my site are auto-blocked. There's also a third mechanism in place, which prevents the user from posting a message within 10 seconds of loading the page. The guestbook seems spam-free and the leak seems patched, but my banlist keeps growing due to the numerous attempts still being made. It's just a matter of time before these F-----S start randomly variating their stupid keywords (v!agra, c^iAl¦s and stuff like that). Is it ethical to just auto-block an entire range of IP addresses after a certain amount of abuse? I've given up on abuse@network reports, since I've never received a sensible reply on any one of my complete(IP, timestamp, logentry) reports.

Has anyone considered setting up a global, public (and moderated) database of banned networks (known offenders) for webmasters to utilize?