Way early this morning, this site got comment-spammed 68 times from one spammer. This means, sixty-eight comments were posted about Texas Hold ‘Em so some fuckstick spammer could increase his Google ranking. I deleted the comments, blocked some IP addresses, but I knew it would do little good. IP addresses are so dynamic, most spammers switch on a weekly basis to avoid being blocked.

So, royally pissed, I went and did some research on how to kill spam as it comes in so I don’t have to delete a bajillion comments a day. I considered just ending commenting period, but I enjoy having the same three people post over and over again, so I didn’t want to do that. Besides, if I did that, then the terrorists spammers win.

I ended up downloading a cool program called MT-Blacklist, which basically is a listing of all known spam sites that Movable Type users have posted. So suppose some spammer is tying to bump up a new website. He posts a comment on my site. I simply take his URL, post it to this huge file, and anyone who has MT-Blacklist will never see a comment with that URL in it again. It’s pretty sweet really, and short of passwording all comments (i.e., making all potential commenters register), the only thing one can do to prevent comment spam.

If you have a blog powered by Movable Type and are starting to get a lot of comment spam, I highly recommend dowloading MT-Blacklist. Though if you have 3.0 or above, apparently there are still quite a few bugs to be worked out.

JAB