This blog has been targeted by comment-spam several times now and it's really getting to be a pain to manually remove them. Movable Type's IP blocking is clearly an inadequate way of handling this nuisance as it can inadvertently block others out of your weblog and IPs can be easily spoofed anyway.
What I would like is a MT plugin (or new feature in the next MT release) that would allow me to block certain URLs from my comments. Any comment or trackback with either a <a href="http://banned-site.com"> in it's body or an author claiming to be from a banned site would be rejected. Adding a new banned site URL to the list should automatically purge any existing comments/trackbacks that include that URL.
LazyWeb request: Any MT guru's out there that would be able to implement something like this?
May I suggest using b2evolution as your blog tool? :P
Recent versions do exactly what you're asking for (checking all URLs against a black list)... and as you'll find out, there are quite a few other such goodies that MT lacks ;))
Posted by François PLANQUE at September 22, 2003 10:41 PMI recall seeing this script at scriptygoddess.com. Perhaps it might help.
http://www.scriptygoddess.com/archives/003944.php
Posted by Steve at September 23, 2003 12:32 AMI'd suggest looking at Adam Kalsey's (kalsey.com) site as he's recently had some good discussion about comment spam and different ideas for preventing it. The specific entry is here: http://kalsey.com/2003/09/comment_spam/ and he had a couple more related ones which you'll see under "Related Entries".
I hope this is helpful.
Posted by Cal at September 23, 2003 1:14 AMPhil did something like this: http://philringnalda.com/blog/2003/07/urls_including_zipcode_are_prohibited.php - is that any help?
Posted by Neil T. at September 23, 2003 3:55 AMI discovered that all comment spam I've gotten so far comes from a single IP block, so I nuked the entire block via a .htaccess file that denies access to mt-comments.cgi to a part of Malaysia. Good riddance.
Posted by Johan Svensson at September 23, 2003 7:51 AMI did read quite a bit of the "prior art" on this subject with proposals like (auto)blocking IPs, throttling the rate of comment-entry per IP, adding a hidden field to the comment entry form etc. A lot of these are, as Mark said, club solutions - designed to make it harder (but not impossible) for the spammer to leave his junk on your site, hoping he will turn elsewhere instead.
Since the main purpose of comment-spam is to leave a link to the spammer's website, I believe that's what preventive measures should be based upon. I don't want to block vigrx's IP (he can easily spoof it to another IP and I would be inadvertently blocking others from China), I want to block the vigrx-dot-com URL.
Phil's post is a step in the right direction, but did not check the comment-body and would need manual editing of Comments.pm for every spammer. What I want is something integrated. Just like MT has an IP-blacklist, I want a URL-blacklist. A centralized blacklist might be even better, though some controls would be needed to prevent non-spam URLs from being inadvertently added to that list.
I think this is a feature Six Apart could use as a selling point for TypePad - they could add manual non-centralized URL blocking to MT, and centralized URL blocking to TypePad. When a TypePad user encounters comment-spam and blocks a URL, this URL could be automatically added to the block-list for all TypePad users.
Posted by Luke Hutteman at September 23, 2003 9:42 AMKilling Comment Spam Dead
In response to a LazyWeb request, I present a new low-impact high-efficacy solution for preventing comment spam and killing ones after the fact. Moveable Type and three MT plugins are required, but no source code hacks are used.
In the end maybe teh best solution is to work on the fact taht spammers are bots and people are people - ie. use that method that pay pal and othe rforms use that makes you enter a 6 didiit code forma graphic that is impossible for a bot to read?
a little bit of a pain BUT would remove the spam problem permanently - maybe good as a backup if all other automatic methods fail?
Posted by io at October 1, 2003 11:31 PMKilling Comment Spam Dead
In response to a LazyWeb request, I present a new low-impact high-efficacy solution for preventing comment spam and killing ones after the fact. Moveable Type and three MT plugins are required, but no source code hacks are used.
To Spam or Anti-Spam, that is the question...
If there's one type of spam that gets on my nerves more than any other, it is spam that promotes anti-spam tools. Sure, anyone that reads this spam is clearly in need of some protection, but by doing this, the anti-spammer becomes a spammer. And if som...