I took the liberty of closing the comment sections on all the old posts, since they were getting seriously clogged with spam. I also tried mass deleting of spam on a couple of posts, but I think the ridiculous volume of spam overloaded things since it gives an internal error when "rebuilding" the files for the site.
Short of installing some plugins to screen comments (Damian?), I think we can make this blog usable again if the author of each post just makes sure to manually close out comments after a few days and manually deletes spam during that time.
Any thoughts?
Posted by GregA at October 18, 2005 04:15 PMAt Grand Text Auto we use Wordpress' Blacklist feature and Comment Moderation features. Blacklist does a decent job of filtering out some spam. The rest (plus any real comments) goes in a moderation queue, which is easy to scan and delete spam in, and approve valid comments. Once a commentor has been approved, any new comments with that same signature are automatically approved.
It's work each day to scan the moderation queue, but it's not that bad, and it works.
Posted by: andrew stern at October 19, 2005 11:37 AMI'd love to see this blog come back to life, so please, try to do something with the spam! You guys are publishing great info - keep it up.
Signed,
Always a Gamer, Never a Game Programmer
Posted by: Justin at October 19, 2005 05:14 PMA friend of mine that runs a blog had some rampant comment spam. Blacklisting cut out too many legit posts so they tried out the captcha module for MT. Seens to have worked out well. It's only mildly annoying to have to enter in the number code based off the image each time.
http://www.learningmovabletype.com/archives/000246concerning_spam.php
Posted by: paul at October 20, 2005 12:27 AMThank you for cleanup. This site has a great deal of potential, and I would hate to see it killed by a few spambots (oh the irony).
I would have no problem entering in a number, having an account to log into, etc when posting.
As a side note, we may want to think about removing the email address requirement to post, as most people are will probably post with phony email addresses to avoid spam anyway.
Posted by: BrianL at October 20, 2005 09:24 AMI second BrianL's comments.
Posted by: mat buckland at October 21, 2005 12:40 AMThanks for the cleanup, Greg!
Good to see some life on this blog again; I was getting worried.
Posted by: Paul T at October 21, 2005 07:54 AMI use Spam Karma on my blog (which runs WordPress). I would say that it operates at about 98% accuracy on weeding out spam from legitimate comments, and gets more accurate as time passes. Highly recommended, if you can stomach a switch in blog software. I'm sure some equivalent must exist for MT.
Posted by: Damion Schubert at October 21, 2005 09:00 AMI third BrianL's comments.
Posted by: steve baker at October 24, 2005 08:18 AMFor those using WordPress, another good plugin is 'Bad Behavior' (http://www.ioerror.us/software/bad-behavior/). My wife was getting a significant number of comments on her site until she started using it - no troubles since.
Posted by: BrianL at October 24, 2005 08:23 AM