Comment Spam? What’s That?
If you go and browse Blogdex today, you might think that some horrible “comment spam” bomb had detonated in the blogiverse. Eeek! Everyone’s blogs are being inundated by comment spam! Or are they?
Here are just a few of the many, many posts on the topic. (Whew, that’s a lot of links!!) Go ahead and take a look at them. Notice anything similar between them? I sure do… Every single one of them appears to be running Movable Type. Coincidence? Surely not.
This site originally ran on :MT:, too (and it’s a very fine program, don’t get me wrong), until I found 
Machine:. I hardly ever got any traffic way back then (heck, I don’t get much traffic now, either) so comment spam certainly wasn’t a problem. Besides, from the sudden volume of all these postings, it looks like the problem may be fairly recent for MT users in general.
Regardless, I haven’t heard of anyone who runs pMachine experiencing comment spamming and there’s probably a very good reason for that: pM has built-in mechanisms to help limit this very possibility as well as attempts to hack your blog. pM includes settings that limit the frequency with which you can comment (i.e. X number of seconds between postings) and also checks “referrer data” in form submissions to make sure that the post is not originating from somewhere external to your site (i.e. a comment spammer or hacking attempt).
It’s rather satisfying to just sit here and smile as all the MT folks appear to run around like chickens with their heads cut off.
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Comments
Well, it’s not beyond the realm of possibility with pM, depending on how you have things set up, especially if you don’t require membership. But the damage should be limited to one spam post (or a few over a longer period of time), rather than a site full.
no spam at my site either. :thumbsup:
I’m using pMachine Pro and I just started getting spammed. I then turned on the time block thing and I’m still getting spam. A friend of mine told me that one sure fire way is to require that a user type in a graphic (not scanable) text string and on the server side do a compare. If it don’t work, don’t allow it. This seems fairly sane to me, but I haven’t the slightest clue in the PM code where to begin. I can make the graphic and do the HTML, no problem, but I’d love some help on the PHP/PM side.
I just started getting content spammed yesterday, and thus far I’m up to about 50-60 spams, partially because I’m currently using the free version instead of Pro and partially because I don’t require membership. It would be nice if someone developed a pMachine blacklist that purged these comment spams automatically. I lack the time or ability to do so, unfortunately.
pmachine 2.4 is supposed to have blacklist and whitelist in it; of course it’s the last version of pmachine that will be out; I’m going to install and play with it now.
:cool: Several sites powered by WordPress have reported comment spam, too.
By Yvonne on October 14, 2003 at 04:41pm link