Winning the war against comment spam

If you have a Movable Type weblog with open comments, you've got to get Jay Allen's MT-Blacklist. It took me a bit of wrestling to get it up and running, but I was losing too much time hunting down, deleting, and rebuilding each time the spammers hit the site.

I also highly recommend the upgrade to the most recent version of Movable Type, if just for the feature called comment throttling. Basically, if a spammer's program tries to leave a large number of comments on a site within too short a period of time, all after the first are rejected. Even before I got MT-Blacklist working, that cut down spam attacks from a typical 18 bad comments at a time to just one.

Hope this holds the line for a while -- less time on defense, more time for posting.

FOLLOWUP: In one weeklong period starting shortly after installation, MT-Blacklist stopped no less than 44 bad comment attempts. The worst culprit was also using multiple IP addresses.

Posted by David on March 11, 2004 12:24 PM