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.

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