Take A Bite Out Of Comment Spam

For a while over the past couple of months my site had been overflowing with comment spam. The poker links were flowing from between every html tag. It was bad, and reduced my motivation and time for posting. I ignored it for a bit, taking a break from the ordeal. But what’s a blogger to do?

At the time I was running Moveable Type 3.0 and so I read their home brewed article Six Apart Guide to Comment Spam. It’s an informative read, so check it out if you are running MT. It took me four steps to get what is semi-protected against these spam bots.

Plan A

First I upgraded to Moveable Type 3.15, but that just enables me to attempt to install the Blacklist plugin. I followed the install directions for MT 3.15 first and MT Blacklist plugin second. Moveable Type updated easily by following the brief instructions. I installed the Blacklist plugin and started to get rebuild errors. Checked permissions. Checked file locations. Backlist would not initialize. I’m not one with patience for debugging so I moved on.

Plan B

A less robust, but easy to install, anti-spam system includes:

1. an open proxy DNS lookup
   
2. close comments on old entries

Fortunately there are a few plugins that do this automatically. I chose MT-DSBL*, for the former, and MT-CloseComments, for the latter. The install and setup were painless. MT-DSBL only require the plugin to be uploaded for it to do its thing and one quick template tag insertion will get MT-CloseComments up and running. I chose to only have the five newest entries open for comments, a reasonable time frame for my posting rate I think.

Over the past couple of days I have had one comment slip through. Hopefully the success is not short lived, but spammers will try new tactics so I don’t expect the best. In the meantime it should do.

Are you slaving over the delete comment button?

* MT-DBSL Requires MT 3.1 or later