Spammers hitting blogs? I have found some solutions.
This morning I read the post in Daniel Dura's blog and I began to search info about how to avoid spam in the blogs. After my research I noticed that the most spammed blogs are run in MovableType (correct me if I'm wrong) and that the spammers use the MovableType contact info to get your e-mail too (see the proof).
Another problem is when your comments are spammed to hard and you have the "e-mail me" option in MT when someone post a comment. It can be annoying.
Also another problem is that many blogs are suffering of spam in their logs. It seems that lot of people came to your site but in your referral logs you only find links to sites full of porn or commercial sites. This has been commented in Wired News. Beware that your post don't show up in Slashdot or Metafiler. This will cost you indeed a lot of bandwith and an extra charge. Here is an example of what I'm talking about, a personal blog (GameGirl Advanced) was charged with a $1500 bandwith bill.
Well, after viewing some of the problems I have some good news to MT blogs, some solutions have been found and they are all together here. I will point out some of them:
- The comment form should be generated dynamically.
- Use dynamic field names.
- Throttling comment form requests from the same IP. Since the process above requires the form be generated by the server, we can slow down any form of spidering this way.
- Since some people don?t enable comments for every post, the server should automatically blacklist comments posted for entries that have disabled comments or where the entry doesn?t exist at all. Using a ?honey pot? approach, the server could return a normal comment form for the invalid entry but upon submitting the comment, the user?s IP would get blacklisted.
- Comments posted to multiple entries within a minute and from the same IP should also be flagged automatically. There should be a way to browse and delete suspect comments.
More info also here.
This morning I read the post in Daniel Dura's blog and I began to search info about how to avoid spam in the blogs. After my research I noticed that the most spammed blogs are run in MovableType (correct me if I'm wrong) and that the spammers use the MovableType contact info to get your e-mail too (see the proof).
Another problem is when your comments are spammed to hard and you have the "e-mail me" option in MT when someone post a comment. It can be annoying.
Also another problem is that many blogs are suffering of spam in their logs. It seems that lot of people came to your site but in your referral logs you only find links to sites full of porn or commercial sites. This has been commented in Wired News. Beware that your post don't show up in Slashdot or Metafiler. This will cost you indeed a lot of bandwith and an extra charge. Here is an example of what I'm talking about, a personal blog (GameGirl Advanced) was charged with a $1500 bandwith bill.
Well, after viewing some of the problems I have some good news to MT blogs, some solutions have been found and they are all together here. I will point out some of them:
- The comment form should be generated dynamically.
- Use dynamic field names.
- Throttling comment form requests from the same IP. Since the process above requires the form be generated by the server, we can slow down any form of spidering this way.
- Since some people don?t enable comments for every post, the server should automatically blacklist comments posted for entries that have disabled comments or where the entry doesn?t exist at all. Using a ?honey pot? approach, the server could return a normal comment form for the invalid entry but upon submitting the comment, the user?s IP would get blacklisted.
- Comments posted to multiple entries within a minute and from the same IP should also be flagged automatically. There should be a way to browse and delete suspect comments.
More info also here.
posted by MoiK78 at 10:37 
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