I wasn’t kidding about wanting a intern to volunteer for spam-destruction. As a perk I will offer posting privileges to the front page of this blog to anyone (who is already a blogger) who volunteers for this all-important spam squelching mode.
This requires both deleting spam and banning URLs daily but also noticing the patterns and coming up with a proposal for how to deal with this in the long run (move to WordPress or Scoop? what about wiki spam?).
(Note: I googled will no one rid me of this * and learned that the original Henry quotation vis-a-vis Thomas à Becket is alternately rendered as Will no one rid me of this meddlesome priest?, Will no one rid me of this troublesome priest? and – to my mind, the least likely as it makes less sense unless the meanings have really changed, or vice versa the most likely as having been replaced with other words if perhaps the meaning of turbulent has in fact changed (paging the OED) – Wll no one rid me of this turbulent priest?.)
Will no one rid me of this troublesome spam?
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6 responses to “Will no one rid me of this troublesome spam?”
I got pretty majorly clobbered last week while off the grid. Something like 250 comment spams. Adding “healz.com” and “bcure.com” to the mt-blacklist eliminated a fair fraction of them, along with adding a few troublesome IP addresses to my banned list. Still an annoying timesink tho.
This auto-updater might be of interest. I haven’t tried it.
http://blog.codefront.net/scripts/blacklistupdater/
The comment spam problem is getting out of control
Will no one rid me of this troublesome spam? @ Radio Free Blogistan Christian is looking for an intern just to get rid of spam. I’ve been battling the bots now for about two weeks and the fight is as gruesome as the Battle of Helms Deep. I have had…
BTW,
Have you noticed how unless we do a rebuild of the site the trackbacks won’t update on the individual archive page? That is also happening on my site.
The inevitable is coming. I’m going to have to change platforms but am absolutely petrified. Just the amount of time and effort to set anything new is scaring the shite out of me.
Do you have a strategy or any thoughts at all about this? Because not using MT is saying bye bye to the blacklist plugin. Is there anything comparable for WordPress or Textpattern?
If you’re looking for a reason (or an excuse) to switch, spam’s as good as any, but if you don’t really want to switch, I think I’d try getting a little further under their radar first. For starters, rename mt-comments.cgi, put the new name in mt.cfg as CommentScript xyzabc.cgi, and put a robots.txt on x-pollen.com telling Google to keep its prying little bots out of /mt/ – there’s no reason on earth why you want to have a known script name, *and* have it heavily indexed. Then, find new words for the stuff in the comment form: googling (blog|weblog) post comment name url isn’t something you want to have find you. What you want is to be different (which is most of what switching gives you anyway).
And, if all else fails, you have friends who can hack in a forced preview. It’s very much a Club solution, easy to get around if it’s published, but with just a few people doing it? I get between 50 and 200 spam attempts a day, every day, and I get one spam actually submitted every week or ten days.
As to rebuilding individual entries when you get a ping: google “rebuilding individual archives when pinged” ;)
Christian
you are not alone on this one. MT Blacklist was great to start with but it seems the spammers have found plenty of ways around it. MT 3 from all accounts is cumbersome and not the answer. Personally Im looking at switching and Im hearing lots of good things about WordPress, but I’ll need a fair bit of time to convert the templates. Apprently their anti-spam features and methodology in posting makes it harder to spam. Do you know much about Scoop? I know you’ve been looking at it for a while, how does it go spam wise and how hard is it to convert?
PS: if you get an itern for spam filtering can you share? :-)
Heh, I think I found a new revenue model for SixApart. :-)