I need help!
October 30th, 2004 at 9:02 am by David FarrarSigh – another 100 comment spams overnight. I can usually stop the one during the day by blacklisting immediately, but not much one can do when you wake up and they are all there.
I simply haven’t got the time to retrospectively delete so much spam, so may have to look at requiring registration system for comments. I would hate to turn off the comments all together, as I think they are the best part of the blog.
Does anyone know if there is a plugin for Movable Type that allows registration or better control of comments? If not, any recommendations on alternative software that I could petition supreme overlord Gordon to install?
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October 30th, 2004 at 10:36 am
I would suggest a transfer to WordPress which I did for the same reason. You can moderate comments before they are posted to your site.
Vote:October 30th, 2004 at 12:16 pm
Moderation would be a bugger as cuts down on responses to comments.
Vote:If you find a solution that involves napalm let me know.
October 30th, 2004 at 12:25 pm
I strongly recommend WordPress. I have been using it nearly all of this year and even got involved in development of it for a while (taken a break at the moment though).
See
http://www.de-generationx.net/blog/archives/2004/07/09/538/
for how I deal to comment spam. It no longer affects me. It is also very easy to implement and Gordon should have no problems getting it setup for you.
If you want help with it or need some more info about it thats not on the website (wordpress.org) then don’t hesitate to email me.
Vote:October 30th, 2004 at 1:52 pm
One tactic you can try is closing down the comments on old posts. Do this by running an SQL statement via the phpMyAdmin utility on your hosting control panel.
Here’s the SQL statement -
update mt_entry set entry_allow_comments = 2 where
TO_DAYS(NOW()) – TO_DAYS(entry_created_on) >= 30;
This is set to shut off anything older than 30 days. I normally use 14 days as the cutoff when I run it at Silent Running. After I started using it, it cut our comment spam by about 80%, since most of the targetted posts were ancient.
Vote:October 30th, 2004 at 1:59 pm
I’ve used WordPress before, and found it excellent – could be a good option indeed.
Vote:October 30th, 2004 at 5:38 pm
I cleaned out a hundred this morning across all the blogs (as I do most mornings). It is a monumental pain in the arse but I’m loathe to install comment registration (although I think it can be done on a per blog basis). WordPress has other limitations. Expression engine is excellent to work with from a site administration point of view. Let me know if you want comment registration.
Vote:October 31st, 2004 at 1:04 am
Like others I would recommend WordPress.
There are two significant anti-spam tools built into it, both are quite simple but work surprisingly well.
The first is that you can set a link limit on comments. For instance if a comment contains more than 2 links the comment is but on the moderation queue instead of being displayed on the blog. This works because a lot of spam contains links while normal comments typically don’t.
The second is that it has a simple filter list, You just add a list of words that typically appear in spam. For example the name of the drug often advertised by spam or the name of a website. Again the comment is added to the moderation queue instead of being put it on the live website.
It is then easy to skim over the moderation queue to see if there are any false positives. Both of these work very well.
There are more exotic solutions available for WordPress such as a plugin that passes the comment through Spam Assasin are available.
Another benefit of WordPress is that it is free, while MT can cost several hundred dollars depending on the situation.
I don’t know the customisations and complexities of your site. But I would at least suggest to have a good play around with WordPress if you haven’t already.
Vote:October 31st, 2004 at 1:28 pm
Just came across the following URL and remembered this post of yours.
http://www.elise.com/mt/archives/000246concerning_spam.php
It contains a list of the different kinds of SPAM affecting MT users, and possible solutions. Looks pretty straightforward to implement.
–John
Vote:October 31st, 2004 at 1:28 pm
Just came across the following URL and remembered this post of yours.
http://www.elise.com/mt/archives/000246concerning_spam.php
It contains a list of the different kinds of SPAM affecting MT users, and possible solutions. Looks pretty straightforward to implement.
–John
Vote:October 31st, 2004 at 1:40 pm
Yes I am having the same problem David, I just deleted 1200 of the bastards.
Vote:Word Press might be an option, I will have to look at it.
October 31st, 2004 at 4:37 pm
I’ll set up a wordpress installation for you david and see if you like it.
Vote:October 31st, 2004 at 11:23 pm
OK You’re good to go. I’ve emailed you some login details. Looks not too shabby. Enjoy the effort transferring all your posts only to discover that the comment spammers have now worked out how to get round wordpress’s protections.
Vote:November 1st, 2004 at 9:11 am
Thanks heaps Gordon. I am on holiday in Australia from this Friday so I will play around with it all then. Not 100% if I will swap, as I have got very used to MT. Depends I suppose how bad the spam continues to be. Ironically there has been none for two days now.
Vote:November 1st, 2004 at 1:49 pm
the Commissar over at “the Politburo Diktat” has useful info about MT spam…
http://acepilots.com/mt/archives/001450.html
Vote:November 9th, 2004 at 10:40 pm
Hi David, hope you see this. Went over to WordPress last week, best thing I ever did for my blog. It’s so much easier to use, the comments are handled better and it even looks more professional. The changeover is easy enough, MT makes it easy by creating backups in plain text format. They even have a plugin (I didn’t get round to using it) that allows search engines to still link into your old URLs. And the anti spam CAPTCHA plugin was very easy to install, and took about 10 minutes to make work, compared to the 2-3 hours of stuffing round I did with the unofficial unsupported MT equivalent. No need now for MT-Blacklist or anything else. The only thing you might spend a bit of time on is playing round with a style sheet, as the default is kacki green and looks quite bad. There are a whole lot of style sheets out there though so that’s not hard to do.
Vote: