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Comment Spams Straining Servers Running MT

Posted by michael on from the critical-mass dept.

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..."

4 of 186 comments (clear)

  1. Old news. by 1_interest_1 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    This has been going on for quite awhile now, and still no official fixes from SixApart?

    Shame on them.

  2. NoIndex HTML Tag by beebware · · Score: 3, Insightful
    At the start of this year (Jan 2004), I actually proposed a possible solution to avoid this sort of thing. Basically, Google et al starts recognising:
    <!-- robots:noindex --> / <!-- /robots:noindex -->
    And then bloggers can put the comments section of their sites inside the HTML "no index" markup and hence if they are hit by comment spam, Google and the other search engines ignore that content.
  3. Re:Not just comment spam by tepples · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Correcting lack of access to text on the Internet is easy: just buy a PC with a screen reader and an account with an ISP. Correcting lack of access to distorted images of text on the Internet, on the other hand, is non-trivial: if the CAPTCHAs are easy enough for blind people's OCR, then they're easy enough for spammers' OCR. If you must use a CAPTCHA, then make it something other than an image. Ask yourself: what questions can a blind person answer that a spambot can't?

  4. Re:challenge the user by jacobito · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Captchas are currently great for weeding out automated spammers; unfortunately, they're also great at weeding out people who cannot see. This unnecessarily renders your site inaccessible to a portion of your audience. From a geekier perspective, this sort of assumption-laden web design runs completely contrary to the accessible, device-independent spirit of the original WWW.

    Of course, since the blog you linked doesn't even work at all as I write this, maybe you're not concerned with accessibility for anyone!

    http://blog.ziffdavis.com/seltzer

    GET /seltzer HTTP/1.1

    HTTP/1.x 200 OK
    Server: Microsoft-IIS/5.0
    Date: Sat, 18 Dec 2004 22:39:46 GMT
    X-Powered-By: ASP.NET
    X-AspNet-Version: 1.1.4322
    Transfer-Encoding: chunked
    Cache-Control: private
    Content-Type: img/jpeg; charset=utf-8