Too much comment spam

Over at the Museum of Hoaxes blog (it is pretty much what it sounds like - a blog that discusses hoaxes), the author has finally had enough of blog comment spam. This is a very common problem in the blog world these days and most sites that get the larger amounts of traffic usually just end up giving up and blocking all comments. While I wouldn't mind more traffic here myself, we are currently at a size that a combination of MT-Blacklist and manual removal works well enough. There is still spam that gets through, but I tend to get to it within a day or so.

I am not sure if the Museum of Hoaxes is running MovableType or if they are using some other blogging software. If they are using MT, then I would highly recommend MT-Blacklist - but I suspect that at this point, that is an obvious enough solution that the author would have already found out about that and installed it.

That said, since it really is the obvious and appropriate solution (at least as a middle step for sites that aren't hugely popular), I don't know why more blogging software packages don't have a similar sort of plug-in available. Perhaps a lack of a plug-in API, or just a lack of interest (or user base).

Another option on MT (and built-in to some blogging software packages) are a variety of plug-ins that will turn off comments on any posts that are older than N days. This is very useful since this effectively reduces the number of possible posts on your site that can be hit by a bot, and therefore reducing the load on the site author to keep it cleaned up.

On an odd note, I have seen a series of comment spam starting on my blogs (this one included) that aren't real messages - so they are spam. But they aren't selling anything either or promoting a live site. It is like someone just creating idiot bots that post random stuff (and random non-working urls) to blogs.
I can only assume that these are signs of poorly configured bots, or test posts that upon success will then lead to "real" spam comments.

Posted by Eric at November 7, 2004 03:04 PM | TrackBack