Comment spammers begone!
Like anyone with an MT blog, I’ve been plagued with comment spam for a while. MT-Blacklist helps a lot, and is great for cleaning up after the fact, but every comment spammer starts off without being blacklisted.
One problem is that MT blogs are so consistent in how commenting works that it’s easy for spammers to automate the process. There are some obvious steps to make this much harder that I’d been meaning to implement for a while. This article details the obvious steps along with several less obvious ones, and finally inspired me to make the changes.
This included changing ‘comments’ to ‘replies’ in my templates.Other than that, you, the end-user, should notice no differences.
It is to be hoped that I, on the other hand, should notice not getting slammed by dozens of comments advertising porn sites.
The growing and critical mass of MovableType weblogs has created an incentive for comment spammers to concentrate on default-config MT blogs to spam. Ergo, perhaps you'd like to easily import your MT archives into the fully open-source (BSD license) NewsBruiser - so indie that spammers don't concentrate on it, so avant-garde that it includes Bayesian comment spam-filtering.
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Also, I hit "preview" and then "post" on this comment and got an "mt-comments.cgi not found" error, FYI.
Posted by Sumana on July 8 2004 18:13
Oops -- hadn't tested preview, and had forgotten to look for hard-coded instances of mt-comments.cgi in the templates that aren't mirrored in my template directory. Thanks for the bug report.
While I was at it, I fixed the annoying "Use of uninitialized value in sprintf at lib/MT/Template/Context.pm line 1187." error that MT 2.661 introduced on previewing comments.
And now that mine is no longer a default-config MT blog, I ought to be fairly safe.
Posted by Zed on July 9 2004 09:06