Comments on: Comment spam in MT blogs

Question: Comment spam in MT blogs

anastasiav — Mon, 23 Aug 2004 12:43:46 -0800

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?

By: erratic frog

erratic frog — Mon, 23 Aug 2004 12:46:56 -0800

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.

By: rhapsodie

rhapsodie — Mon, 23 Aug 2004 13:26:27 -0800

mtblacklist.

By: reklaw

reklaw — Mon, 23 Aug 2004 13:40:31 -0800

*cough* ditchmovabletype *cough*

By: bcwinters

bcwinters — Mon, 23 Aug 2004 13:52:05 -0800

That's helpful, reklaw! Thanks! How about some recommendations of other blogging systems that provide better comment handling?

By: pwb503

pwb503 — Mon, 23 Aug 2004 13:54:12 -0800

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.

By: heather

heather — Mon, 23 Aug 2004 17:37:07 -0800

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.

By: gen

gen — Mon, 23 Aug 2004 18:54:59 -0800

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.

By: languagehat

languagehat — Mon, 23 Aug 2004 19:11:03 -0800

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.

By: anildash

anildash — Tue, 24 Aug 2004 00:18:45 -0800

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.

By: heather

heather — Tue, 24 Aug 2004 09:32:19 -0800

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.