blog.jimbo.org.uk

May 27, 2004

Comment spam in the post-MT era.

(What post-MT era?)

So I'm getting more and more comment spam, these days. That is, people leaving comments not because they have something to say, but because they have a link to post that they want Google to look favourably upon because a number of bloggers have linked to it.

At first, these comments came just occasionally, and I deleted them manually when I noticed them. Now I'm getting a few every day, and I use the rather nifty MT-Blacklist to pick them out and remove them. Sadly I can't use it to filter them at posting time, because it doesn't understand the threading hack, but it's a good removal tool all the same. Any URLs the spammers post that aren't already matched by the blacklist get added when I purge their comments, too, so next time they spam I can spot them more easily. Great. But still, the spam is sitting there looking ugly and being indexed by google for a few hours, or even a couple of days, before I notice it. So I'm closing entries for commenting as soon as they start getting spammed — the vermin seem to pick on particular entries, rather than spamming across the whole blog, so closing an entry once it starts attracting spam seems to keep a reasonable lid on the situation. Thankfully it seems to take a while for spammers to notice an entry and start attacking it, so this shouldn't interfere too badly with normal commenting — that said, if you have a genuine comment to post, please do email me about it, and I may even add it to the site manually if you want.

This still sucks. I don't want to have to close entries for commenting, be vigilant for new entries getting spammed, or go making people jump through hoops to comment on my blog. Thankfully, I have a feeling the end is in sight: most comment spam seems to be targetting blogs based on Movable Type which, as I'm sure everyone knows by now, recently fell from favour throughout the "blogosphere" following the release of version 3 and its new, clearer licensing scheme. So now, hopefully, at least one of the following will happen:

• More people will move to MT3, which uses authentication for comment posters, thus effectively killing off comment spam (although it's alleged that comment spammers are simply registering for TypeKey accouts and carrying on as before)
• More people will move away from MT altogether, to solutions such as WordPress, Drupal, and the expensive but oh-so-shiny ExpressionEngine.

Either of these means fewer people using MT2, which means there is less benefit to running an MT2-comment-spamming operation — either way, this has to mean less comment spam for me, right? The alternative is that with people moving away from MT2, those of us sticking with it will be a smaller group for the spammers to attack, and so each attract a larger share of the spam; if that happens, I might have reconsider my decision to stick with MT.

Oh, also, I have a new job for the summer, with BT Syntegra. I start on Tuesday. Woo, and yay.

This entry brought to you by the I've-not-posted-for-a-while-and-should-be-revising department.

Posted by James at 16:00
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Comments

Posted by: Jamison at July 15, 2004 01:41 AM

Posted by: Jamison at July 17, 2004 02:52 AM