i would like to take a moment sing to the comment spammers one of my favorite smiths songs…
“i’ve come to wish you an unhappy birthday, ’cause you’re evil and you lie, and if you should die, i may feel a little sad but i won’t cry.”
freaking comment spam. after not paying any attention for over a month, and assuming the basic things i did to prevent it worked, i found and deleted well over 1,000 comment spams… thankfully i am smart enough to use direct sql queries to do so instead of movabletype’s ungodly slow interface to delete 20 at a time. delete * from soandso where yadda like ‘%poker%’ took care of about 150 in one swift line.
i’ve taken yet more precautions by installing mt-blacklist, a plugin that is supposed to filter out a lot of junk. unfortunately it doesn’t seem to play nice when the comments are running under mod_perl, so i had to switch back to the regular, slower way of doing things. so the comments are a bit slower. at least, perhaps, they’ll be clean.
i’m also going to be closing comments for entries older than about a month, as most of the comment spam ends up in olllllldddd entries.
if it continues, i might have to implement one of those visual turing tests like all of the big sites use, where you have to type in the code that is in the hazy graphic. or, worse, i may just implement mandatory registration.
we’ll see how this goes.
sick spamming bastards…..