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December 30, 2004
comment spam
Due to heavy spamming over Xmas the file mt-comments.cgi has been disabled. So the comments function is turned off. No comments can be made. The trackback function does not work.
These spammers sure are bottom feeders. Their destructive actions indicate the way that capitalism destroys the public commons and why the free market needs regulating and policing.
I am currently in the process of a long overdue upgrade to Movable Type v3.14 plus MT-blacklist as a first step to deal with the pernicious comment spam problem. It would appear that there has been a targeting of MT, due to the popularity of its publishing system, by the spammers.
In the meantime I have been using the old ISP banning method.However, as the spammers had so many domains in their arsenal, trying to add each of them as a Blacklist string was futile. It was fighting a losing battle. I was spending hours over Xmas deleting their comments on a slow dialup.
The reason I stayed put with this for so long was that I've been waiting for Movable Type to fix the bugs in their MT-blacklist software that resulted in escalating comment spam that caused extreme server loads. Movable Type has been working on the problem.
I'm not sure whether the spam comment problem has been solved. People are voting with their feet and moving on: --onto WordPress. I've decided to pay my monies to the now corporatised Moveable Type and to stick with them. Things are changing in the blogging world.
In the meantime--until the upgrade and plugins have gone through--comments can be emailed to me and I will incorporate them into the post as an update, to which I may respond.
Update
The Movable Type upgrade has been successful.However, problems are currently being experienced with the Movable Type comment spam Blacklist plugin. It will be addressed tomorrow with the help of some local tech support.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at December 30, 2004 06:04 AM
Trackback Pings
TrackBack URL for this entry:
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