Comments spam

Posted on September 29, 2003
Filed Under /dev/null/ | 278 views |

Lately I’ve been getting comments posted to old entries that have been linked to from somewhere, comments that are really just spam. This means somewhere out there someone wrote a MoveableType spamming engine (on the assumption that spammers wouldn’t bother manually adding spam comments to stories via the web interface) which seems like a lot of work for next to zero payoff to me.

After a few seconds of thought I think I can block such automated posting simply by adding a hidden field to the web interface that the MT comments CGI looks for before allowing any comment to be posted. Actual users wouldn’t be affected by it since it would be transparent to them but the automated engine would be blocked since it wouldn’t know what value to use in that field. Seems like a simple enough solution to me.

A few more seconds of thought came up with a way around it. However that requires the spammer to either a) make their spam engine much smarter and capable of scraping web pages or b) want to target me badly enough that they tailor the engine to my site specificly. Neither seems particularly likely.

A few seconds later it occured to me that my spam-proofing my site to stop the (4 and counting) spam comments might be far more work than its worth since I don’t really care. But for any that do, there’s one possible approach you might want to implement.

Comments

2 Responses to “Comments spam”

  1. Jay Allen on September 29th, 2003 7:47 pm

    Try this:

    The full version (with explanation and full instructions)

    http://www.jayallen.org/journey/2003/09/killing_comment_spam_dead

    The Dummies version

    http://www.jayallen.org/journey/2003/09/killing_comment_spam_for_dummies

  2. Kroov Hamuts on September 15th, 2006 2:39 am

    Realy? That’s 28836 crazy!!

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