The coalition of the blogging
Sarah’s having trouble with comment spam. She’s retreating in the face of these assaults.
A while ago I was just as desperate because my efforts at defeating spam weren’t working. I should give an update, though, because (knock on Formica®) I’m winning all my battles against spammers these days.
From: Nils Jonsson
Sent: Wednesday, September 15, 2004, 11:28 AM
To: Sarah Shay
Subject: Comment spamSarah, I had increasing trouble with comment spam at Casa Jonsson, too. I no longer do! I’m using a combination of two tactics to defeat the spammers, and it really isn’t much of an effort at all on my part.
- Install the Movable Type plugin called MT-Blacklist (http://www.jayallen.org/projects/mt-blacklist/latest/MT-Blacklist.zip)
- Close the comments on all entries over one month old (within Movable Type, click Edit Entries and open each old entry; change the Allow Comments dropdown to Closed)
Occasionally (once or twice a month) a spammer will get through, but it’s easy to see the last five comments on the Movable Type page for my weblog; from there I can delete the offensive comment and click Rebuild Site to remove the junk from my pages. Actually, Movable Type sends me e-mail whenever I get a comment, and MT-Blacklist puts a link in the e-mail that allows me to delete the comment and rebuild my pages with a single click.
Spam and comment spam are a little like terrorism. I feel bad capitulating to them. So I fought back!
Let me know if you have any questions or need help with any of the above.
Blessings!
– /\/. _/.
Yeah, I use mt-blacklist and it’s pretty darn good at straining out the garbage. I find that if you occasionally import Mr. Allen’s own master blacklist, it helps. Also, I have MT send me all of the comments so, while I occasionally got deluged with 50 comments from i-se|x0rz.com or whatever, it was a simple matter to add them to the blacklist.
Here’s the definitive list on defeating comment spam in MT: http://www.elise.com/mt/archives/000246concerning_spam.php