December 02, 2004

Comments Disabled

The comment spam problem has gotten drastically worse over the past few weeks (yes, I already have MT-Blacklist installed). Comments will be disabled for now until further notice.

Update

Okay, they’re back on again. One of these days I’ll probably dump the easily-exploited Movable Type for WordPress or something, but for now I’ve implemented a somewhat better throttling mechanism via Phil Ringnalda. The one built-in to Movable Type 2.661 only throttles comments from the same IP address, and intelligent spammers and immature script-kiddies can easily get around that. Now the site will disallow more than one comment every five minutes. I’m not exactly heavily-trafficked, so I figure that should do for now, but apologies for any inconvenience!

I’ve also closed comments on any entries older than one month. I disliked having to do that, as I like to think several of my posts are of a timeless nature (then again, I’m rather prone to delusions of grandeur).

Update 12/4/04

Okay, Geoffrey and Laura have pointed out that the spam problem is just as bad or worse for WordPress. The reason I mentioned WP was that the actual problem wasn’t so much the spam itself, but a spike in server load from having to rebuild the individual archive page after each comment. A system which allows dynamic individual archive pages (using PHP or whatnot) would not require a rebuild. But if there’s no comment-spam protection for WordPress, maybe I should just upgrade to Movable Type 3.0. Well, maybe when Blacklist 2.0 improves enough. Throttling seems to work well enough so far, so I can afford to wait some more.

December 02, 2004 04:34 PM in Blogging | Permalink
Trackback
Sorry, Trackback pings are disabled for now. Drop me an e-mail and I'll manually update the page to link back to you.
Comments

WP gets spammed now too.

Posted by Geoffrey at 12/04/04, 08:51 AM (link)

In my experience, WP is a LOT more easily spammed! The combination of MT-blacklist and closing old comments is a very effective way of knocking the spam down. :)

Posted by Laura at 12/04/04, 09:02 AM (link)

Really? I guess it was a case of grass being greener. Thanks much for the information!

Posted by fling93 at 12/04/04, 10:29 AM (link)

test comment. i had a real comment before but i’ve forgotten what it was.

Posted by jon at 12/08/04, 09:36 PM (link)