mylesgrant.com

Comment Spammers Should Be Shot On Sight

I hate comment spammers. I hate them more than email spammers. Email spammers have been fairly easy to deal with — I installed spamassassin, every once in a while I tell it what it missed, but most of the time I forget about it. The few messages that get through are easily deleted.

Comment spamming has been ramping up steadily though. And every time it happens, it’s a huge pain in the ***. Comment spam occurs when someone (actually a program), posts comments to entries on this site with links to websites that have online poker, or sell viagra, or rolex watches or whatever. Usually when it happens they do it to 20 or so entries. The same text every time.

It’s stupid, though. I require approval before comments appear on the site. So when a comment spammer does his thing, I get 20 emails about new comments. Log in to Movable Type, tick the checkbox next to them all, and hit delete. No one ever sees them besides me, which defeats the “purpose”.

You can see why it bothers me though. And it’s starting to be an everyday thing. I have had MT-Blacklist installed for a while, but as far as I can tell, it doesn’t do anything to help me. So this morning I followed a few of the steps on this site. We’ll see if it helps, hopefully it helps. I don’t want to have to make people go through captchas, close comments on old entries, or install fancy Bayesian filters for comments. It’s just a website for crying out loud.


14 Comments

Is it a coincidence that Dave Shea just posted about this very topic today? Knowing how cool you are, I suspect it’s not. ;)

Posted by Brandon on 1 February 2005 @ 12pm

I’ve been seeing reports of a high level of trackback spam today, and in fact I got hit by that this morning. I had been looking into comment spam solutions this weekend already, but the mess that was my comment and trackback spam this morning finally forced me to do it.

Posted by Myles on 1 February 2005 @ 12pm

But, no, I hadn’t seen Dave Shea’s post yet.

Posted by Myles on 1 February 2005 @ 12pm

O I C

I guess I camp RSS harder than you do. :)
(testing new TypeKey identity, booyah!)

Posted by Brandon on 1 February 2005 @ 12pm

Yeah, I actually have work to do today. No time for RSS ;-)

Posted by Myles on 1 February 2005 @ 12pm

It’s not “just a website” for some of us, Myles. For some of us it’s much more.
I don’t want to ever hear you slander this great website again.
Oh, and good luck with that whole Bayesian filters thing. Must be rough.

Posted by Lee Anne on 5 February 2005 @ 11pm

My biggest annoyance is referrer spam; my logs are almost completely useless since they’re packed to the brim with overhyphenated .info sites.

Posted by mike on 7 February 2005 @ 8am

Luckily I don’t use my referrer logs, otherwise that would be yet another annoyance.

Also, I haven’t had any comment spam attempts since I posted this entry.

Posted by Myles on 7 February 2005 @ 9am

I have a mod for TypePad that makes the browser compute some sort of hash via Javascript… the comment spam bots aren’t browsers and can’t compute it, so the spam never makes it to your approval queue. Legit clients never notice anything happened unless Javascript is disabled.

Posted by Christine on 7 February 2005 @ 5pm

I’ve thought of doing something similar, and it’s my next step if this doesn’t work out. The only piece of comment spam I’ve gotten since I made these changes appeared to have been submitted by hand (bizarre), so that wouldn’t help anyway.

Posted by Myles on 8 February 2005 @ 7am

Three rules for the spam game:

1) you can not win.
2) you can not draw.
3) you can not leave the play.

Greetings,

Antonio, from Malaga (Spain)

Posted by Malaga on 14 April 2005 @ 7am

Myles,

Phil Fibiger (http://fibiger.org) and I (http://getluky.net) both were using MT 2.64 with MT-Blacklist for over a year, and had recently become very unhappy even writing to our blog because of the huge increase in linkspam, ping/trackback spam, and comment spam.

I finally made the switch to Wordpress as a test, and I have been happy to only get one piece of spam in the past month of running my blog. That’s opposed to 30-50 links per day of spam on MT 2.64. Now, i’m not sure what else MT has done in version 3. But I would recommend you at least give WP a try if the spam is getting the best of you.

Phil and I joke about how his posting frequency went from 1 per quarter to 3 per week, simply because all the time he used to spend deleting spam, he now spends posting to his blog.

It’s a wonderful world,

Gordon

Posted by Gordon Luk on 6 May 2005 @ 5pm

Actually, Gordon, I haven’t received a single comment spam since I implemented the above. Hasn’t increased the frequency of my writing though ;-)
Still, it truly is a wonderful world without comment spam.

Posted by Myles on 6 May 2005 @ 6pm

Comment spam is rather hard to avoid. Some people in blogskins.com are doing it and it really is a pain. I wonder why people spam, is it some sort of ritual or do they enjoy doing so? :S

Posted by ubd on 22 May 2005 @ 9am

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