Blog Comment Spam Removal

mattwarden writes "The back-and-forth between spammers and mortals continues. Anyone with a MovableType blog that is even remotely on the map has no doubt been hammered lately with comment spam, comments made on entries by a script or program in an attempt to increase search engine page rankings. Prior to today, one had to manually delete each of these comments. No more! Jay Allen has developed a plugin for MovableType that removes these spam comments based on a blacklist (of both hostnames and regular expressions) and intercepts new spam comments before they are made. There's even a one-click link included in the comment notification email that makes it easy to de-spam your blog."

Comments

Oh well.

[The Fink]

I was going to write one of these for my couple of sites, but instead, I came to the conclusion that I'd be better off disabling comments.

The more I think about it, the less I think comments are actually, you know, useful in a personal web-space of any kind. Few of the comments I get at least are of any real value, other than to indicate that either (a) I'm being spammed again or (b) someone human is actually reading my site (for which I'm always grateful, although I have other ways to find that out anyway).

yay!

[croddy]

it's about time someone did to the weblogs what the bloggers are doing to the rest of the internet.

I, for one, welcome our new blog-spamming overlords.

Well, that about says it all.

[The Fink]

A front page slashdot article with a grand total of eight comments.

Shows what the average slashdotter thinks of "blogging"... can't say I'm surprised (and not in a negative way).

I wonder, if the term "blog" and derivatives (which I personally detest, but that's another matter for another forum...), put people off - if it had been omitted, I wonder if more people would have read and commented.

Re:Well, that about says it all.

[Kalak]

/. seems to forget that *Slashdot is a blog.* Look for the definition of a blog, and you'll find /. fits. It's one of the most successful, is on steroids, and has gone commercial, but this is really Taco's blog and we are all just guests. /.ers not caring about blogs is kind of like a human that doesn't care about oxygen. It shows how pathetic many /.ers are, since they don't know the definition of what they're slamming (standard procedure around here).

I'm surprised the spammers don't hang out here...Oh wait, they just spam the articles instead of the comments.

Suspicions confirmed.

[Kyrthira]

I knew there was a reason I liked LiveJournal. Lots of the fun, not so much of the hassle. (Just some drama-llama stuff now'n then.) I say it's worth the $25/year for a paid account. I gave up on blogs/guestbooks on my websites long ago, because all I'd get was spam; either for the purposes listed in the article, or for some bloody pr0n site or another.

"Mortals"?

[John Hasler]

> The back-and-forth between spammers and mortals
> continues.

I'm fairly sure spammers are mortal. If I ever catch one I'll find out for certain.

Image based password

[too_bad]

Like many websites (including the whois query page at netsol) have the image
based passwords. Basically, they are images with some text with a lot of wavy lines
and the assumption is that it is hard for programs to do an OCR on them, but easy for
humans to read and understand the text.

Just make the bloggers read and re-enter the text in the slightly-obfuscated images before they
can enter their comments. If they spent atleast a few minutes composing their article
it should not be to hard to type in a few more letters to be allowed to post.