Liz Lawley reports getting hammered with comment spam on her blog tonight. If you’re running your blog on MT, you need to have MT Blacklist. It’s easy to install, and it works like a charm. I’ve just updated the Wordherders’ blacklist, which I’ll link to here.
jill walker also reports a spate of spam in comments:
http://huminf.uib.no/~jill/archives/blog_technical/damn_spam.html
Could it be that those lists help ranking? I.e. the spammers are really trying to get on a banned list that is shared amongst bloggers in order to boost their ranking with the search engines of the sites they advertise?
Ooooh. That would be really sinister, wouldn’t it?
By the way, in adding the entries from other people’s blacklists, I’ve boosted the number of entries in our blaclist by over 1,000. Wow.
As per our other question George (about how user accounts function and alter other blogs via Blacklist), according to the blacklist documentation, it looks like any Herder can add to the blacklist without any problems — they are just limited in their ability to configure beyond that (and can’t delete spam off of others’ blogs).
More info here: http://www.jayallen.org/projects/mt-blacklist/latest/index#permissions
So, herders, feel free to add to the blacklist through the MT-Blacklist interface. Every week or so, I go in and update from MT-Blacklist and run a check on all trackbacks and comments in the database.
Hey, check it out. MovableType 2.66, with improved anti-spam strategies:
http://www.movabletype.org/news/2004_01.shtml
Via Edith “I’m a cool indie musician as well as a righteous computer expert” Frost: http://www.edithfrost.com/archive/2004/01/14-upgraded_mt_again.html
better safe
Jill and Liz have been deluged with comment spam in the last week. Me? About 10. So taking the hint have been updating my MT blacklist. Mine is available here, and includes George, Liz and Jill’s. This is the way…
Spam and chips, spam and sausages
How exciting! After reading of other bloggers’ irritation (here and here and here, for starters), I have finally arrived: I…