Comment Spam

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If anyone was on the site today between 2:30 and 8:00 PM EST, you were likely greeted with a few hundred random comments whose authors linked to some pretty repulsive sites. Movable Type made the cleanup an excrutiating process:

# Find the latest comments listed in the blog editing menu
# Click them to find out where they were left
# Click on the parent blog entry
# Tag any other offending comments for deletion
# Close comments for that entry
# Save, rebuild, wash, rinse, repeat

There were over 200 comments for which I needed to repeat this scenario. Thankfully, some SQL came in handy. Closing comments for the whole site was as easy as UPDATE mt_entry SET entry_allow_comments = "2";. But, still–that was half an hour of my life wasted deleting comments (and now another half hour wasted writing about it).

Ironic that this should occur so close to Jeffrey Zeldman‘s recent affirmation of basic human goodness. That, and my consideration of setting up comments for the links.

WordPress already has features that help comment administration–including moderator approval–which I’d like to implement after switching (an event that is no longer an if). In the meantime, comments will only be open on the five-or-so most recent entries.

10 thoughts on “Comment Spam”

  1. Yeah I noticed, some of the names they used were absolutely horrid … even for someone as morally lax as myself (or as much as I pretend to be ;-) ) .

    Wouldn’t a registration system help stop comment spam?

    Thats one thing I don’t really understand about the currently blogging community. MT3 has, what feels like, a hacked on registration system but Mark Pilgrim already commented on the short comings of that.

    I dunno. Maybe i’m stuck back in the BBS days when everyone needed to be registered to post to a system. ;-)

    Mike

  3. Mike–apparently [1] registration only stops people who don’t like registering (a “Club” prevention technique [2]), which does not include comment spammers [3].

    Until someone actually makes comment spamming a less profitable venture, I think real-time moderation may be the best solution. But, then, I’m just keeping my ear to the ground to see what other people come up with. :)

    1. http://diveintomark.org/archives/2004/05/14/freedom-0
    2. http://diveintomark.org/archives/2002/10/29/club_vs_lojack_solutions
    3. http://diveintomark.org/archives/2003/11/15/more-spam

  4. Ryan–dunno, really. I think because I actually like the WP interface a bit better than Txp. That, and there’s more than one developer on the project. WP has been out for a couple of years, but Txp took almost a year to re-release after the last beta preview.

  6. Ken:

    I agree that it probably prevents the people that just don’t want to register, but I think its very much a matter of how you want people to comment on material on your site. I don’t think comments should be a free-for-all. I think they should come from people in the club. Again, this might be my BBS tendencies coming back.

    But once you have registration in place you can block user names, IPs, etc … and you can customize the interface enough that the normal scripts aren’t going to work (at least not without modifiction), which will begin to incure a huge amount of time on the comment spammers parts.

    Ryan:

    Text pattern is one of those things that looks like it has a lot of potential in the future, but really isn’t quite there yet. And with some of the names switching from moveable type to WordPress there seems to be a larger community forming around WordPress than TextPattern. So, in theory, we should start seein WordPress develop faster than TextPattern. Though, once TextPattern is GPL’d that might change.

  9. I see your point. I was just happily checking my e-mail when I see “14 comments on your Movable Type site” and I’m all like… uh… ok, wow, must be a nice redesign. But NO! It’s all spam! Fortunately I know enough about the MySql backend to delete it all in one shot and rebuild, but then it happens again the next day! Argh! So I installed MT-Blacklist. It works pretty well, so far as I can see :) .

  10. I installed a little script that requires you put a number from a photo into a box before you can comment. I thus went from about 10 spam comments per day to 0. Yeah, it prevents some accessibility, but I don’t think I have many blind readers.