« MHS Update: First Show Of The Season | Main | Sandisk Cruzer Micro »

March 20, 2005

Scot Hacker On MT Comment Spam

Scot Hacker speaks thoughtfully about his experiences trying to fight MT comment spam. He's dealt with it first-hand as a multi-blog MT host. I did turn off unregistered commenters for a while when TypeKey came out, but then turned them back on when MT 3.1 and MT-Blacklist 2 came out, not realizing that MTBL would need the resources it does to filter out a comment spam storm.

Seeing as comment spammers are the reason why I've received nastygrams from my host, I will probably follow Scot's lead and require TypeKey authentication. Scot's the first person outside of Six Apart that I've read who had such a thorough dissection of the problem and the steps needed to combat it. I'm only dealing with a single blog here (MHS doesn't allow comments - yet), but I'm getting spammed often enough that it's gotten to be a real annoyance cleaning up.

Posted by Alex Harden on March 20, 2005 8:22 AM |

Comments

Speaking of-- sorry that Spam-Karma blocked your recent comments on Ross Notes, I've added it by hand.

Posted by: Ross Karchner | March 20, 2005 10:12 AM

No problem.

Posted by: aharden | March 20, 2005 11:24 AM

MT-Blacklist seems to be working great for me so far. Although the new thing is spam trackbacks! Damn them. I read an article on just letting Blacklist do its job at moderating comments... but I hate logging in and seeing all those orange moderated buttons. Although I know MTB is doing it's job, and doing it well... I still go through and delete them.

I haven't really looked in to what these spam comments do to the server and my friend hasn't said anything about it. Maybe I should talk with him to see if he's noticing anything on the server.

Posted by: Jonathan Smith | March 21, 2005 1:32 PM

Post a comment

(If you haven't left a comment here before, you may need to be approved by the site owner before your comment will appear. Until then, it won't appear on the entry. Thanks for waiting.)