September 06, 2004
Spamstorm
Wow, are we getting spammed. Nearly 100 comment spams in the last 24 hours, and they're still coming.
Unfortunately, our copy of MT Blacklist seems to be busted. Not sure if the problem is at our end or theirs, but there it is. So we have to delete the damn things by hand. Complicating this is the fact that MT sometimes slows waaaay down -- probably because of this same spamstorm.
As we delete the spams, we're turning off the comments on all posts older than 30 days. I regret this. Once in a while, someone will stumble across one of those older posts and comment; it doesn't happen often, but it does happen. So the spammers are forcing us to cut those people off. They can still comment on recent posts, but it's not the same thing.
(Can anyone tell me: does comment spam actually work? Are there people who will see these things, click on them, and make a purchase? Or is it just pure stupidity -- thoughtless selfish greed on one side, willingness to fall for a marketing ploy on the other? Does anyone know?)
Anyhow. We've considered an upgrade -- we're using an older version of MT -- but frankly, the new version (3.1) doesn't seem like it's much better, at least where spam is concerned. MT Blacklist was developed by a third party as freeware, bless his heart. I suppose we could move to some other blogging software altogether, but I've heard some alarming stories -- lost archives, munged passwords, you name it.
We're still thinking about this. More in a bit, perhaps.
Posted by douglas at September 6, 2004 04:07 PMMT-Blacklist is very easy to install and it provides good protection. Get it here: http://www.jayallen.org/projects/mt-blacklist/
Posted by: János at September 6, 2004 04:28 PMAnd comment spam is not about clicking the links in your weblog but about Google ranks. To make it short Google calculates the rank of a page by rank of the pages that contain inbound links to that specific page. That's why they put their links to as many sites as they can, using specific keywords to fool google and get higher places in the search results...
It's truly disgusting.
Posted by: János at September 6, 2004 04:33 PMHm, Doug mentioned that we do have Blacklist - and it worked like a charm until two days ago. Then, it (or something) corrupted two of our MT files on our server -- now it doesn't work anymore. Deleting and re-installing doesn't help.
Unfortunately, our old version of MT isn't to be had anymore, so I cannot just go and replace the corrupted files. If someone out there has Movable Type Version 2.63 and would be willing to send us two of the lib files, we'd be more than grateful!
Claudia
Posted by: claudia at September 6, 2004 04:35 PMThere's a copy of MT 2.63 here: http://www.justlittlethings.com/MT-2.63.tar.gz .
(That is, I assume that it's MT-2.63. It could have been modified, but that's unlikely.)
I suspect that the Movable Type licence would prohibit you from downloading it, but I haven't checked.
Blacklisting by IP address is a bit doomed as a strategy, but it might help a bit. We've found that using "captchas" (asking the user to type in numbers displayed in an image) helps a bit -- the point is to stop automatic posting, since it's fairly difficult to program a computer to read the numbers from the image -- but there are, astonishingly, some spammers who will just fill in the form manually dozens of times. I think there's a Movable Type plugin for this, but it's a bit feeble.
I also have a script which will remove comments by searching for certain patterns in them (for instance, links to particular sites), but it's fairly rough-and-ready. Drop me an email if you want a copy of it, though.
Posted by: Chris Lightfoot at September 6, 2004 06:17 PMContact me via email - I have some ideas and can also modify the server if it is required.
Larry
Thank you, Chris, for this link. Now I have all my original files archived, just in case.
However, it turned out that the problem with Blacklist was actually that our server had been upgraded to a newer Perl version which didn't recognize something or other. Three lines of code inserted and things work fine again.
The spamstorm has not subsided, though. I'm thinking of altering the commenting section a bit -- I don't want registration because I don't like registration and should therefore not ask it of my readers. There is something called captchas which I might try (it will ask you to verify your being a human by copying a random number into a textfield, very easy but hard for machines to do).
One of these days. It's not as if we weren't busy around here...
Again, thanks for the helping hands stretched across cyperspace. Our reader community may be small but it is quite sophisticated. ;-)
Claudia
Posted by: claudia at September 7, 2004 07:25 PMSo thaaaaat's why I couldn't reply on any of the old entries... drove me nuts. Anyway, since I now can express myself, I've started reading your blog yesterday morning and I got pretty far, as you can see. I even skipped school partly for you. I just found it in google while searching for something about Romania, and seeing your country throught foreigner's eyes is always fascinating. Especially when it's so funny at times :D
Posted by: Jen at October 8, 2004 10:30 AM