I woke up this morning (bright and early at 8:20 AM) and checked my e-mail. I found that I had received almost 30 new comments on my weblog! Boy was I excited - I thought that I had finally hit the big time.
Alas, I had been targeted by a spamBot, and all of the comments were psuedo-ads for online poker sites. Not that I don’t have an interest in the subject, but they were spam nonetheless.
Luckily for me, MT-Blacklist picked up each and every one of the submissions, and put them into a holding tank until I could check it out. From there, it was a couple of clicks, and they were gone forever - poof!
Dan wrote about a new technique he’s using a while back. It seems like that’s working well for him, but this Blacklist plugin for MovableType is pretty solid. I haven’t had any spam get through in months and months.
I suppose I can consider it a badge of honor - if I’m getting enough traffic to attract some spammers, that’s a good thing, right?
I just moved on from e-mail to my morning reading, and there is a story out about Google’s attempts to help curtail comment spamming. Their solution is that developers should edit their comment software, and that any link posted within a comment block should receive a hidden attribute. Google will then ignore any links that have that attribute. See, the spammers are posting links to poker, viagra, and porn sites in hopes of getting Google to come by and see that there’s a link to their site - thereby increasing their “page rank”, part of the equation used by Google to rank pages in search results.
And, as an added bonus, it’s valid XHTML. From the article, it looks like MSN and Yahoo! are also on board.
The only downside I see is that, for non-spam comments, I might *want* the search spiders to follow those links.
Comments
2 Comments
I actually use the MT-Blacklist in combination with that technique you linked to above, and that seems to work the best for me.. In the past 48 hours for example, my log shows 352 attempts at bots trying to submit spam through my comment form, of that, 3 got through. I agree with what you’re saying, just think multiple levels of defense is the best way to go..
And about the google anti-spam news, that’s great and all, but it doesn’t actually /stop/ comment spam, just lowers the benefits for doing it. I don’t think that will make the people who do it pull up any, but we can hope :)
And exactly right that for some things in comments, I’d want them to be indexed by spiders.
Posted January 19, 2005 at 2:06 pm by Dan .
I agree Dan - multiple levels of protection. It’s like wearing 2 rubbers.
Anyways, shortly after this new protocol announced by Google, The folks at SixApart - developers of MovableType - announced the release of a plug-in that follows it.
http://www.movabletype.org/news/2005/01/movable_type_nofollow_p.shtml
Posted January 20, 2005 at 10:09 am by Bryan Buchs .