Comments May Go Offline
Apparently I am under a full-on massive spam attack, and Movable Type is not helping; my web host continues to press me to switch to WordPress, threatening to shut me down. I have been planning such a switch for a while now, and for the past week have been prepping–despite having a full load of work for my school, plus other plans made long before which cannot be cancelled. Still, the change may not come fast enough–and so my web host may shut down the comments script while I am away over the weekend. I will try to get the blog up and running fully again asap when and if that happens, but it may take a few days. Thanks for your patience.
Postscript: checking my spam logs is an incredible revelation: spammers are hitting my comment script every few seconds. I expect there are as many as ten thousand spam attempts on my site every day.
This is a full-out assault of a kind I thought even spammers would not attempt. Who knows, maybe they figured that I had badmouthed them one too many times and decided to drop on me like a ton of bricks. Has anyone else out there experienced anything like this before?
I’ve been delighted with BlueHost as a hosting service. For the money, anyway. Just sayin, is all.
I think your website may need a face lift. Have you ever used Rapidweaver made by Realmac Software? It is really easy to use, to maintain and you can make professional websites. There are also many templates available from third parties. When you have time take a look at it.
Cheers
More than anything, I supect that spammers have caught up with what was state of the art when Movable Type 3.17 was current. Keeping your blogging software as up to date as possible is not optional, Luis. 😉
WordPress might be a good way to go. I might also mention that you can get the core version of ExpressionEngine (which is what I use) for free as well. Either should serve you well for a really long time.
There is a fellow that I know, Brad Feld, that knows alot about internet software. I’m not sure what he is doing on his blog, yet it might be interesting to take a look at it:
http://www.feld.com/blog/index.php
WordPress’s anti-comment-spam solution has been excellent for me. I run two blogs; one is my personal blog, which only gets 80-100 hits a day. On that one, Akismet (the anti-spam plugin) has stopped over 56,000 spams. (Yes, I know that’s small potatoes compared with what you get here on blogd.com)
On another site, I get over 1,000 hits a day, but strangely that one doesn’t get spammed like crazy; in several months I’m only up to 12,000 spams killed.
Anyway, the great thing about WP and Akismet is that the work is done on THEIR servers, not yours. Damned if I know how exactly it works, but it does work well.
Paul: Thanks for the tip, and I will look at them if for no other reason than curiosity, but I don’t think that’s the solution; I am fairly confident that almost any web host would react the same way to a cgi script using up massive amounts of CPU time.
Anonymous: actually, WordPress supposedly is the answer. I don’t know why, but at least that’s what both the web host and a lot of other people recommend. And it’s free, plus a lot of people develop software especially for that system, whereas Rapidweaver probably doesn’t.
Sako: Hrmm, probably I should have been updating–but dammit, I was afraid that the spam software had taken a step backwards when MT-Blacklist had its support discontinued. Even so, the web host claims that Movable Type’s software–in general–ate up far more CPU time. So maybe it would not have helped.
Paul (later comment): actually, stopping spam is not the main issue; Mt-Blacklist, which I am using now, stops more than 99.99% of the spam that hist my blog. I don’t think that there’s *any* way to stop the spammers from trying to spam your site.
The issue, it seems, is how much of the server resources your blog eats up every time there’s a spam attack. Supposedly, WordPress does a much better job of this… which maybe is why it is included with the software package most web hosts provide for you.
Not to mention that, as you guessed, I get a lot more spam than you do. Recently, I have been getting more than 56,000 spams in *one week*. Disturbing.