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February 17, 2005

Movable Type

As you can see, the spam robots are killing this blog. I previously used JayAllen's excellent MT-Blacklist plug-in, but now I've upgraded to Movable Type 3.15. MT-Blacklist is not supported on Windows servers running MT 3.15. So what are my options (aside from making everyone register to comment.) I want to block certain words like cheap-pills and onlinepoker, like I used to do w/ MTBlacklist. Help please!

Posted at 12:27 PM




24 Comments

One idea in 3.15 would be to set all comments to not be approved. The downside is that its more work for you to go through and weed out the good ones to approve, the upside is that the spam doesn't get through to the site as easily.

Posted by: Mike at 02/17/05 1:07 PM | Reply
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I had the same thing happen and moved my blog to using WordPress (www.wordpress.org). Wordpress has a developer comunity that writes plugins for the system - one of which is called Spam Karma (see http://www.jonabad.com/spamkarma/sk_doc.html).

I now have no spam. It's really powerful and includes a great feature where it will show an image with letters and numbers in it to commenters in order to determin if they are spam robots.

Took 5 minutes to setup once wordpress was in place. I know it sucks to change blogging platforms, but the spam features were well worth it.

Posted by: Peter Adams at 02/17/05 1:08 PM | Reply
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You lost me at "Windows servers" *retch*

Posted by: nathan at 02/17/05 1:18 PM | Reply
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MT-CloseComments will help quite a bit. It doesnt' block spam, but it closes comments on posts that are older than a period you can select (or switches them to "moderate".)

since the spambots usually trounce your backposts, this vastly narrows the target you present without forcing you to make everyone register with TypeKey or moderate every single comment.

link here: http://thought-mesh.net/MTCloseComments.html

Posted by: xz at 02/17/05 1:19 PM | Reply
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I know Coolfer and a few other blogs I check regularly use moderated comments. Probably with the system mentioned above -

Posted by: John at 02/17/05 1:58 PM | Reply
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I have no spam at my site.

Here's my trick: Have a site that absolutely no one visits. It works like a charm.

Posted by: Topher at 02/17/05 2:28 PM | Reply
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Try using one of those things where the person has to verify that they are a person by typing the numbers/letters that appear in the box. Does that make sense? I'm sure it has a name, I just don't know what it is.

Posted by: potato at 02/17/05 2:29 PM | Reply
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Yes Potato is called a Secret G Force Incoder, and you have make contact with the Schwartz to get one.

Posted by: bubblehead at 02/17/05 2:51 PM | Reply
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have you tried changing the name of your mt-comments.cgi file? I changed mine and the spam level at Verbose Coma went down about two thirds. I still use Blacklist though because (thankfully) we're on Linux servers, you need to change any references to the cgi file.

For example, if you change it to mt-speakout,cgi, then any references to mt-comments.cgi need to be changed too. It's only a couple though,

Posted by: Hamish at 02/17/05 2:57 PM | Reply
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The comment spam helped contribute to my blog's demise. I had renamed mt-comments.cgi to something else (mt-jive.cgi or something equally stupid), and while that helped, nothing completely defeated the spammery. MT-Blacklist helped some, but alot still got through.

Incidentally, I didn't realize Movable Type ran on Windows. Cool, I guess.

Posted by: Doug at 02/17/05 3:07 PM | Reply
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Potato means the scode plugin. I installed it on my blog and it has totally halted spam. I keep MT-Blacklist running as well on the off chance spammers start working their way around the "captcha".

Posted by: brian w at 02/17/05 3:14 PM | Reply
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Um, I guess you're stripping HTML out of comments. In which case:

sixapart.com/pronet/plugins/plugin/scode.html

Posted by: brian w at 02/17/05 3:15 PM | Reply
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In response to Topher who gets no spam because no one visits his site. I would recommend that he stop writing about music or anything else worthwhile and just post news and skimpy photo's of Lindsey, Britany, Ashlee and any other teenybopper currently popular. You may be called a whore but at least you'll have more traffic.

Posted by: craig at 02/17/05 4:26 PM | Reply
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scode seems like a viable alternative to Blacklist, but I don't know how to install GD.pm ... anyone wanna help? E-mail me PLEASE. Thanks.

Posted by: stereogum at 02/17/05 4:28 PM | Reply
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what's up with spam? i mean, really. do these comapanies attract *anybody* to these things? sure, maybe at the beginning before people knew any better...but these days, who in the world would go for these things? i know it's all automated, but is it really worth whatever time/effort is put into writing up these scripts?

it seems to me that if i wanted a bigger penis i would go seek it out. i wouldnt be swayed by a generic message in my inbox.

Posted by: poopandpee at 02/17/05 4:50 PM | Reply
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scott, Hostony will convert you to a unix server pretty easily, if you want.

Posted by: solace at 02/17/05 5:18 PM | Reply
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> scott, Hostony will convert you to a unix
> server pretty easily, if you want.

I was curious about that. What are the implications of switching to Unix? Will I have to do anything different in maintaining the site, or is it just a backend thing that wouldn't even affect me?

Posted by: stereogum at 02/17/05 7:11 PM | Reply
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Don't change a thing, stereogum, please. I've found true love, won thousands of dollars in poker, and created a cheap (yet huge) stockpile of Viagra for my twilight years through the spam on your site.

Posted by: madskrillz at 02/17/05 8:15 PM | Reply
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I have to second the Wordpress motion. I used to get completely massacred with comment spam on my MT install, I've had maybe two [failed] attempts since changing over to Wordpress. Part of the issue is that MT comment spam is so damned easy. It's a separate cgi program that you don't even have to hit from a page. Pretty much everyone's mt-comments.cgi [or whatever it was] is in the same place, so some bots see you're running MT and *BOOM* just hit that file a million times.

My real question is... Does comment spam actually work for those who are doing the spamming? Do people REALLY go check out the products being so baldly hawked? I know I wouldn't. I've grown a grudge against poker itself, in fact. GRRR. And I'm thinking of shrinking my willy. ;)

Posted by: RSL at 02/18/05 8:08 AM | Reply
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I recently switched over to MT and was getting HAMMERED by spammers and I installed the blacklist plug in and conversation killer/Close Comments (which someone mentioned above) and I went from about 150 spam comments a day to 2 or 3. The Conversation Killer plug in is great since no one really comments on posts once they are off the front page and if they do, no one see's it. Highly recommended.

Posted by: information leafblower at 02/18/05 9:50 AM | Reply
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switch to a Linux host and install MT 3.15 with Blacklist.

I use www.surpasshost.com which comes with MT built-in. Although i don't know if they have 3.15, i manually installed my version problem free

Posted by: Bear at 02/18/05 12:45 PM | Reply
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winBLOWz iz L4/\/\3

Posted by: kevin at 02/18/05 1:44 PM | Reply
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Posted by: dfdsfds at 02/23/05 1:43 PM | Reply
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mike.mathews@berkeley-domecq.com
mike.smith@berkeley-domecq.com

Posted by: wanker at 10/21/06 5:24 AM | Reply
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