Notes on SpamLookup from the creator of MTBlacklist

If you have a blog, then you are likely very familiar with comment spam. If you have a blog running on MovableType, then you are probably familiar with MT-Blacklist. It is what we run here and I am certainly pleased with it for the most part (although its trackback clearing functionality has been essentially crappy since version 3.x of MT).

We posted on here on Spamblogging before about SpamLookup, but I haven't had a chance to install it yet to see how well it works. The creator of MT-Blacklist has posted his thoughts on it. The key points are:
1) It works and it is awesome
2) If you get a lot of spam all at once, it puts a huge load on your server (it looks like it spawns a new process for each hit on mt-comments.cgi and therefore if you are getting many simultaneous hits on that code, you will have that many simultaneous instances of SpamLookup running - which is where that high load is coming from).

It looks like SpamLookup is very good if you have a MovableType blog and is the way to go - but if you tend to get a lot of comments all at once (I appear to from what I have seen of my logs), then you will want to hold off until an update of the code which is easier on your server. I personally am going to continue to hold off at this point until that next version comes out.

Posted by Eric at May 9, 2005 01:44 PM | TrackBack