Comment Spam–OK, This Is Not Blowing Over
Another spam deluge. I have been getting a dozen or two blog comment spams which have been blowing past all my filters, mostly with blogspot addresses. Even if I blocked all blogspot addresses (which I don’t want to do anyway), it still wouldn’t get all of them. I though I could wait the deluge out, but it’s been almost a month now, so for the time being, I’m setting the number of allowed links in the comment text to zero.
You can still leave links though; both in the URL window (less attractive to spammers because it’s a dynamic link which give no Google juice), and in the comment text as straight text; any URL without hyperlink code (the “a href” command) will be OK. In the comment window, leave out the “http://”–just type beginning with “www…”
Furthermore, if you write the URL out in plain text, I will turn it into a hyperlink myself during moderation. So few of my visitors leave URLs that this will not be a problem–and it will certainly be easier than manually deleting the dozens of comment spams that come through in any case.
As always, thanks for your patience in this regard.
Whew, I thought it was only me! This is getting ridiculous; I’m back to figuring out Perl expressions for the heavy hitters these days. I won’t ever do it, but I’ve even mused about turning off comments completely.
Nah, don’t turn off comments. Just set your spam filter to not allow hyperlinks, if it has that setting. You have Movable Type, so use the SpamLookup extension. That did it for me–no more spam getting through. I’m just worried about legit commenters getting stopped, though.
The only problem is, when SpamLookup blocks a comment due to excessive hyperlinking, it doesn’t tell the commenter!! It sends them on to the “moderation” page, and worse, it does not send me an email of the offending message–so the commenter who posted a link thinks it’s in moderation, when actually, it’s been completely trashed. Bit of a bug, if you ask me.
Actually, I’ve been considering switching to the newest version of MT and using Askimet, but it’s a bit of a leap–if it doesn’t block spam as well as I’m used to, then it’s a lot of work to convert back to my old version.
Right now I’m stuck at MT 3.17 as that’s the last version to supper MY-Blacklist, the only filter I completely trust…