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May 10, 2006

Spam, spam, bacon and spam, spam.

Read not books alone, but men, and amongst them chiefly thyself. If thou find anything questionable there, use the commentary of a severe friend rather than the gloss of a sweet lipped flatterer; there is more profit in a distasteful truth than in deceitful sweetness. Francis Quarles (1592 - 1644)

Once more the little electric trolls have begun inundating this site with comment spam. Their purpose is not to gain my attentions with their tepid, canned flattery, or have the few that read here click on their links, but instead to drive up their google rankings by sowing URLs in as many sites as possible (the more pages link to you, the better you fare in a google search).

Comments on this site are moderated, and so such spam is never published, however, the numbers to be excorcised has been climbing steadily recently, which has prompted me to look for solutions. Movable Type 3.16 doesn't have the advanced filters that 3.2 does, so my options are a little more restricted. Here are my first thoughts.

Require every commenter to use a TypeKey Id. This is rather draconian, however, as not everyone wishes to register for one.

An image generator, requiring the commenter to decypher mangled text, confirming there is a live human commenting. This however, disenfranchises the visually impaired.

Require non-typekey registered commenters to preview their comments before posting, throwing a simple impediment in front of the comment spammers scripts. This is quite likely the least effective, but also the smallest bugaboo of the three, so is the one I have tried.

The comment scripts are tweaked, my fingers are crossed. If you have a better solution (or think this one abysmal), leave a comment. Just dont forget to post afer previewing.

I'll let you know how successful it is.

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Not overly. It appears to have slowed them down a little. I suspect the mt-comments script is being hit directly, bypassing the post buttons.

Scrawled illegibly by Meathe at May 10, 2006 10:12 AM

Comments

I use Wordpress, for which someone has made a plugin called Spam Karma2. It's eaten every piece of comment spam I've ever gotten. It quarantees naughty ones automatically and then e-mails you a digest at the end of the day letting you know of hits. You then log into your Wordpress blog and authorize the ones that are actually not spam, and dump the rest.

Posted by: Ginger at May 10, 2006 02:57 PM

Quarantines, even. :P

Posted by: Ginger at May 10, 2006 02:58 PM