Lately, I have been hit with a lot of comment spam on my blog, and I'm quite frankly tired of it. I've been thinking of ways to alleviate the time spent cleaning all this up, but can't seem to come up with a good solution. As per the recommendations on Six Apart's website for curbing if not eliminating comment spam, I have installed MT-Blacklist as well as renamed my mt-comments.cgi script to something else. While MT-Blacklist catches hundreds of attempts per week, I still get around 100/week that get through. Renaming the script has had no effect as the bots have adapted to that trick.
I've resorted myself now to looking into either upgrading to MT 3 to get a lot of the new features like requiring a TypeKey account to comment, or switching to another blogging software altogether. Not sure what switching will buy me, but this would be my opportunity. The one advantage to switching is that I would have to purchase a license for MT 3 since I have 2 blogs and 2 authors, and the free version only allows for 1 author. It's not that I don't want to support the development efforts, I just have better things to spend my money on now, like my daughter.
I read a news release from Google today that says they are joining the fight against comment spam by allowing blogs to put a special tag (rel="nofollow") in the URL's that would tell Google to not give that URL any credit, and eliminate the purpose for comment spamming. There is also an article speaking out against this idea as it will invalidate Google model for their page rankings and make the web of legit hyperlinks "pointless". I'm not sure which side I agree with. I can see both sides of the coin, although I know how much of a pain it is to clean up all the comment spam. And will this "solution" really eliminate the spam? Doubtful.
Posted by doug at January 19, 2005 11:43 AM | TrackBackI can't remember where I saw this, but blogs with ra mpant comment spam are hit more frequently by comment spammers. So any efforts to keep the spam off your site WILL help.
And I turned off commenting for the weekend and have not had one single comment spam attempt since. I did install the mt-dsbl plugin in block mode, plus I now use the nofollow plugin. I will let you know how they work out.
Posted by: stacey at January 19, 2005 12:29 PMYou are using MT 3 correct? How was the upgrade path from 2 - 3? That is another one of my concerns. The $$ is not a big deal, but a concern, but if I can't upgrade easily, it's out of the question.
Posted by: doug at January 19, 2005 12:58 PMI didn't upgrade. I installed MT3 in a new location and got it all configured and set up the way I wanted, then I exported my blog entries and imported them into MT3. That way if I lost anything, the original blog was still alive. After that it was some minor directory renaming and config tweaking and I was back up. I did that over a span of a week or so though.
Posted by: stacey at January 19, 2005 01:49 PMway back when, i read recommendations of just changing the name of the url for posting comments.
(just like it seems you have, doug). doesn't that work? what about adding extra input parameters?
are these spam bots really smart enough to read all the parameters from the comment page and submit them all properly? i would have thought they were just hitting the post url and moving on.
i get NO comment spam, and i'm pretty sure it's due to my non-standardized input form. if all the world used my weblog with its url configurations, i guess i'd have a problem.
Posted by: john at January 20, 2005 08:47 AMA few others have chimed in with their opinions of this whole NOFOLLOW tag that Google is proposing. I mostly agree with what everyone is saying, both the positive and negative.
Why 'rel="nofollow"' isn't the answer.
Thoughts on Weblog Comment Spam Prevention
no-follow refinements
If you decide to make the switch, I have to plug e107. It does implement the (rel="nofollow") tag... or at least the cvs version does, (the next release will also). It's also highly configurable.
http://e107.org
Posted by: Jason at January 21, 2005 09:09 AMhah, i think that last comment brushes the boundaries of being comment spam itself. ;)
i'm sure mt has rel-nofollow plugins of its own, and you don't need to uproot your whole codebase for this tiny feature.
oh yeah, you should use my weblog software, because it's super-l33t. and don't forget to buy your viagra.
Posted by: john at January 21, 2005 12:00 PMI was simply giving an alternative since he said "maybe" about switching to different software...
Posted by: jason at January 21, 2005 01:16 PMoh...jason...i know you! the url associated with your name on that comment led me to believe you were someone from spreade107 just campaigning randomly.
Posted by: john at January 21, 2005 03:50 PMYep, it was me... Spreade107 is just another site I have.... Gotta throw those plugs out there :-)
Posted by: Jason at January 22, 2005 06:56 AM