August 23, 2004

12:43 PM

I came home from my two week vacation to find an enormous amount of comment spam on my MT weblog. I've now read this so I guess I know how to stop it from happening again (if I can figure out all the tech stuff), but deleting is turning out to be a nightmare. Is there some easier way to delete this than going into each post and individually deleting the spam comments?
posted by anastasiav to (10 comments total)

Do you have 3.0 or what?

If you have 3, you can go to your MT menu, select edit comments and then check all the ones that are the spam ones. They should be the latest ones.

If not, MT blacklist will list all the ones that seem to be spam
(from their database thingy) and ask you if you want to deleted them all - when you run it for the first time.
posted by erratic frog at 12:46 PM on August 23, 2004

mtblacklist.
posted by rhapsodie at 1:26 PM on August 23, 2004

*cough* ditchmovabletype *cough*
posted by reklaw at 1:40 PM on August 23, 2004

That's helpful, reklaw! Thanks! How about some recommendations of other blogging systems that provide better comment handling?
posted by bcwinters at 1:52 PM on August 23, 2004

Once you have MT-Blacklist installed it'll be easy to keep track of and delete the spam. You can dump MT if you want but I'd just install MT-Blacklist (it is pretty easy to install too...) Once installed, run the tool and it'll automatically delete all the spam for you so you don't have to do it one by one.
posted by pwb503 at 1:54 PM on August 23, 2004

the only downside of mtblacklist is keeping up with the actual blacklist. i checked my email while we were away only to find over 850 comment spam posted in a 24 hour period as i'd been offline for about four days (3 to 4 comments in every post on my site!).

mtblacklist made it easy to remove, but i've followed a suggestion on the photoblogs.org blog and changed the name of my comment script. i haven't had any comment spam since then.
posted by heather at 5:37 PM on August 23, 2004

Until Blacklist 2.0 comes out, I'm staying away from MT3.0.
Blacklist is my friend. I use Blacklist many times a week. It is absolutely essential to any MT installation as far as I am concerned.
posted by gen at 6:54 PM on August 23, 2004

MTBlacklist is great. What you need to know (I had to be told this -- thanks, Songdog!) is that after you enter a new URL, you hit De-spam (default is last 25 comments -- change it to 100 or more) and it will show you all comments from banned URLs and ask if you want to delete them. It does them all at once and automatically rebuilds the entries for you. Bliss.

And reklaw, don't be a jerk.
posted by languagehat at 7:11 PM on August 23, 2004

MTBlacklist 2.0 lets you automatically update your blacklist, heather. Only runs with MT3 though. Everybody else's advice above is great, but if you can hold out for MT3.1, we're bundling blacklist into the plugin pack that will be coming out with the new version.

And reklaw, your advice sounds like people who debug windows troubles by telling people to switch to a mac. I've rarely seen that technique be persuasive.
posted by anildash at 12:18 AM on August 24, 2004

anil, i think that on MT install, there should be a step in the process where you pick the comment script name. if i choose "poopypuppy" and you choose "ilookhotinwhitesweaters" and everyone names their scripts something other than the same thing, wouldn't that stop spam bot comment hell dead in the water? course, wouldn't stop individual turds bent on making life miserable one comment at a time, but it would stop things like almost instant 850+ comment spam.
posted by heather at 9:32 AM on August 24, 2004