Slashdot Mirror
Comment Spams Straining Servers Running MT
dJ phuturecybersonique writes "Netcraft reports that 'Comment spam attacks on Movable Type weblogs are straining servers at web hosting companies, leading some providers to disable comments on the popular blogging tool. The issues are caused by bugs in MT, forcing publisher Six Apart to recommend configuration changes while it prepares fixes.' More..."
First and foremost, it's free (speech and beer) and distributed under the GPL.
Second, the actual developers of the software actually participate in the support forums, so if you do have a question, it's likely to be answered very fast by someone intimately familiar with the software.
Third, it's a lot less susceptible to comment spam, especially after applying a few plugins and hacks. I've never received a single one, and that's not for lack of spammers trying.
Fourth, it's very easy to customize the look and feel of the site without knowing any PHP. HTML and CSS is about all you need to know. Knowing PHP helps a lot if you want to really customize it, but it isn't a requirement.
Finally, they've already included a Movable Type import utility, so those of you who are sick of MT for this and many other reasons can move over with little hassle.
Signed,
A very happy WordPress user and occasional contributor.
How am I supposed to fit a pithy, relevant quote into 120 characters?
I had to ditch Moveable Type explicitly due to comment spam. The real problem with it was that there was no way to delete more than one at a time. The web app only displays the last five comments and then you have to go digging through every article to find the other spams. Real pain in the ass. I switched to Wordpress, which is also beseiged by comment spam from Online Poker outfits. In Wordpress, however, you can mass-edit with all comments listed with checkboxes to delete whichever are spams.
In Moveable Type and Wordpress, you can pretty much eliminate the script-driven spambots by renaming the comment cgi handler and then editing all other files that reference it. I didn't think of this till after I swtiched to Wordpress, though.
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
Some context: This is a "freeper". They have also been known to use militant mob-style tactics to bother/silence those who dont agree with them, as parent has dealt with. Kinda ironic ya know... they are freepers yet they work hard to silence those who dont agree with them.
The Doormat
If you're not outraged, then you're not paying attention.
sage advice :)
The worst part of being a slashdot member is watching people devistate and ruin a server because of childish acts of vandalism.
Take for instance whenever slash points towards wikipedia, within minutes the page will be modified to some trolls' agenda.
Having to wade through the crapflood of comments on blogs and forums after slash has been there is almost embarassing sometimes.
The servers can generally cope with a slashdotting and work perfectly just hours or days after the initial hit, however the trolls handywork can end up staying for longer.
liqbase
We had a similar problem on our ziffdavis.com blogs (like my security blog) and we think we have solved it with with one of those graphic field challenges to the user (enter the value in the nearby graphic).
Already done! And they're for wordpress! My favorite is Blacklist, and it works pretty well, long as I update the definitions every once and awhile.
it would be neat if search engines like Google could be trained to ignore negative score Slashdot comments
Given that the static page is written at a Score:1 threshold, and that Google obeys Slashdot's suggestion in robots.txt not to index the dynamic pages, this is already the case.
A few problems, as a Wordpress user and as someone who's run into problems w/ other people's MT blogs:
- spam bots attack WP and MT through various means, one of the most common being to simply POST to the mt-comments.cgi or wp-comments-post.php URLs on peoples sites
- the bots mainly post huge amounts of links to stupid websites, like viagra or poker strategy. the goal is to get a higher google ranking by having links from many different sites
- the biggest problem for WP users is that you get flooded with literally hundreds of comments per day. if you have good filtering you'll at worst just have to sit around and delete some manually
- the biggest problem for MT users(or that MT users cause) is that because of the poor design of MT, the comments script takes up a huge amount of CPU time. apparently it actually goes through the process of rebuilding the static post pages even when comments are moderated or auto-deleted. now imagine you have 500 posts and they all get hit at the same time - it's something close to a forkbomb on the server
The best solution to all of this is to find a way to prevent the stuff from ever getting posted. Once it's submitted you're going to have to analyze it in some way and decide if its SPAM or its good. There are some simple solutions like renaming the comment post scripts, and some more complicated ones like using a verification number or requiring users to register. In any case, it's a very major problem for almost anyone with a blog.
Yes, they post comments which are basically just a list of URLs with lost of links to their sites. The theory being that this will increase their page rank. Luckily, MT already has a blacklist to filter those out but it has to be updated constantly.
...
The funny thing is that we (another weblog system, but suffering from the same problem) are seeing a lot of spam posts recently where they put the link text into the href attribute and the actual URL as the link text. Not sure what they're trying to accomplish with that - maybe it's just more proof that spammers are actually stupid
That's what the WordPress plugin Spam Stopgap Extreme does.
Multiple blogs are partially supported in 1.2, and 1.3 will have much better support for this type of installation (e.g. web hosting, etc.)
How am I supposed to fit a pithy, relevant quote into 120 characters?
>>In any case, it's a very major problem for almost anyone with a blog.>>
Not true.
I use Livejournal. Virtually everyone I know who has a blog is also on Livejournal.
None of us are having any of these MT/WP problems.
I AM concerned about the weird shit going on with PHPBB right now, where messageboards are being spammed with hundreds and hundreds of bogus user accounts that lead back to spam sites pusing porn or viagra or the like.
Speculation is they are signing up for these accounts so they can put their website URL in their user profile. Then they get Google to index the board's user list, and bingo, they suddenly have what looks like a legit site linking to their porn or viagra or whatever. Of course it's not the site doing the linking.
These accounts are never activated so these people are never posting actual messages. The issues are the bullshit account clogging the user lists and helping the linking. The biggest hassle is that there's no easy way to purge PHPBB users.