Update: Update your MT to 3.14, to fix some of the issues described here

Many webhosts have had whole servers go down recently, because of comment spam. This has been especially evident for those hosts with popular Movable Type blogs (same software I’m using).

The reason this happens (if I’ve understood correctly), is that the archives rebuild automatically, once a comment is posting. Add a new comment every other second for a long time, maybe even with TWO spammers going full blast at the same time, and that becomes a problem. If you’ve got several popular blogs (read: lots of attempted comment spam), and it brings the whole box down.

Moderating doesn’t help, because a new comment still triggers the rebuild. This is a flaw in the software, one I’m sure they will fix soon.

As far as I know, this particular webhost has not had any problems, but my other webhost has been hit pretty hard. They’ve installed server wide word filters on some of their boxes as a stop gap measure.

So, what did I do? Well, I don’t get that much blog spam, but it’s irritating enough when I wake up to at least 87 new comment spams, so I started thinking about ways to stem the tide a long time ago.

My first action was to get rid of B2. That software is no longer developed, and you had to either go into each post manually and remove each comment. Or you could also go into PhpMyAdmin and remove them there, which I did for a long time.

But get this: I still get many 404’s in my log from attempted blogspam from the B2 comment script!

I left the Movable Type installation alone until I contracted my old spammer - the Texas Holdem crowd.

I then tried installing James Seng’s Scode. For some strange reason it didn’t work. I’ve given up on it for now, and will try other things. But while I tried to get it to work, my comment script simply didn’t work for quite a while. And what do you know? The Texas Holdem crew got tired of it and went away! For now…

So, when I enabled the comment script again, I renamed it for good measure. Still no spam after a few days. But that could change at any moment.

So some more measures: Moderation
This only works cosmetically, in that my visitors won’t see the spam. But it’ll still tax the server.

So I changed to dynamic templates, at least for the archives. It’s easy enough to do in this version of the software, but those on an older version should upgrade.

Still no comment spam yet, but I’ve found one hack that supposedly should help:
http://jayseae.cxliv.org/2004/12/17/mt-approval_0.1.1.html

It’s built on the idea of adding something to the forms that will be very hard for the spammers to figure out and add to their scripts. I haven’t tried it yet, but I’ll keep it on my shortlist of things to do. You should see a lot of people in the comments and trackback section soon.

This entry was posted on Saturday, December 18th, 2004 at 3:33 pm and is filed under Tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.