As noted previously, a growing problem for people who run Weblogs that allow user comments is comment spam - short posts from people (or bots) trying to drive up Google ratings from porn sites and the like by creating lots of links to them (since Google indexes Weblog comments along with the everything else). Hadn't been a problem for me until Friday, when all of a sudden, Fusion Weblogs and some Weblogs I run in my offhours got barraged with a flood of spam comments (most from the same Russian "Lolita" site, grrr). It took me an hour over the weekend to clean up all the crap. From this I've realized a couple of things:
Movable Type is a wonderful tool, but it absolutely sucks as a group blogging tool, in the sense that there's no way to manage all your blogs at once, for example, to kill identical comments across multiple Weblogs. You have to go into each single Weblog and delete each single spam comment by hand and then add the IP address of each offending spam to the individual blacklist for each individual Weblog (all those in favor of me getting off my butt and learning enough SQL to do all this at the database level, raise your hands).
I just cannot wait for Jay Allen to release MT-Blacklist, a Movable Type plugin for dealing with the problem that could come out as early as today. One cool feature - the ability to import blacklists of known spammers, which will let bloggers quickly build up a wall against the spammers (a semi-permeable wall, no doubt, if e-mail blacklists are any indication, but certainly better than nothing; and hey, if anybody wants the IP numbers for that preteen site, let me know).
Back to CompendiumI, too, eagerly await MT-Blacklist, but in the meantime there's always your .htaccess file, in which you can block ranges of IP addresses via by specifying a netmask or a CIDR block. That's how I dealt with the spammer you refer to.
Posted by: Dave Trowbridge on October 13, 2003 08:26 PMPost a comment
