How I Shrank the Blog Spam

Many ISPs, including mine, are having major problems with comment spam straining their servers. I can report that two simple fixes have blocked a HUGE fraction of my MT 2.6x comment spam: closed comments on all posts more than a month old, using the close comments plugin, and I rewrote my comment templates to require users to preview comments once before posting. Combined with my usual MT-Blackllist list, the results are dramatic. Not 100% blockage, but at least 97% of the stuff that used to get through isn't. And much of what remains is weird spam — links to non-existent web sites … which I presume are being groomed for sale once they get high googleranks. (And lots of these are in the .de TLD for some odd reason.)

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One Response to How I Shrank the Blog Spam

  1. Heidi says:

    One other thing to consider: rename your comments script to mt-comment.cgi. You have to make some changes in a few forms, but spammers looking for “mt-comments.cgi” won’t find it.

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