SimpleBits ~ Comments are Down

7:50 AM

I’ve just about had it with comments. This morning I’ve been flooded again (for about the 10th time) with about 100 random spam comments, strewn all over the archives. I’m tired of this.

Commenting is disabled (temporarily) — maybe even until MT has comment registration. Dealing with comment spam is just plain ridiculous. Argh!

Update: Thanks to all for their suggestions in combating the evil comment spam. I’ve installed Jay Allen’s MT-Blacklist plugin for Movable Type. I’ve had pretty good success with it in the past on a few other sites. If anything, it’ll make deleting unwanted comments a heck of a lot easier. Next up is to figure out how to automatically turn off comments on older posts… Comments are back on! Yay.

Add your own

11 Comments

ak → www.alexkeeny.com/simplicity/

so you’d kill me if i spammed right now?

Brian → savedbyzero.org

MT released an update:

http://www.movabletype.org/news/2004_01.shtml#000882

Will this help you?

Dan Cederholm → www.simplebits.com

ak - no, just delete you :-)

Brian - thanks, I did upgrade a few days ago — it definitely helps, in that URLs in comments are now turned into redirects, therefore ruining the Google page rank thing for spammers. The problem is that spammers don’t really know about this yet, so they’ll continue until everyone has this feature — and it’s well known.

Scott Johnson → speed.insane.com/

Ah, the irony. We’re posting comments on a post entitled “Comments are Down”.

Anyhow, I’m glad you’ve got them re-enabled. I hope that sites find ways to deal with the spam because blogs just aren’t the same when they lose the interaction that comments provide.

David → fuddland.org.uk

“Next up is to figure out how to automatically turn off comments on older posts…”

The CloseComments plugin may be what you’re after.

You just copy it to your plugins directory and put <MTCloseComments old="n"> anywhere in your main index template, where n is the number of days after which you want posts to be closed to comments. [mySQL version of MT required.]

oli → oli.boblet.net/

Check out Yoz Graheme’s seven quick tips for a spam-free blog. You should do tip 1 (rename your mt-comments.cgi file, then update the mt.conf file) immediately - that should stop a majority of the spam. Your comments script is in one of the two expected places, so it’s a big bullseye for spam bots.

Between that and MT-Blacklist I’ve had zero spam. But then again I’m no one of consequence ;-)

Hans → www.hanskellner.com/

I also followed several of the tips in Yoz Graheme’s site. Tip #5 did the job. Adding the preview then post two-step process killed off all comment spam on my MT site. It’s an easy change and additionaly gives (forces :’) commenters a second chance to review what they are going to post.