It's no small irony, then, that this is the day I finally get around to announcing that comments on most older posts have been closed. We have comment spammers to thank for this; the poker and drug guys will just have to take their action elsewhere. Unfortunately this also spells bad news for some of the entries that have taken on a life of their own, thanks to Google. Unfortunately we'll hear no more from the car emblem people, the friends of Cheetah, and the truly confused people here or here. Sorry, gang.
Posted at January 31, 2005 08:16 PMHmm, not using MT-Blacklist then?
In my experience I have had only a single spam slip through its net, while a full 75% of them are stopped in their tracks, and 25% is marked for moderation.
And with the latest rel="nofollow" plugin the spam is grinding to a halt, since there is no more incentive to post it.
Posted by: Sivani on January 31, 2005 11:55 PMI'm the technical lead for KJ.prod......
We are using MT-Blacklist (though since we're still running the 2.x series of MT, not the most latestest version which would allow moderation, I believe). It helps a lot, but since I haven't cronned updates to the blacklist, we sometimes fall out of sync with the master source, so some spam slips through.
The nofollow.... I'm guarded on my opinion there. I tend to agree with Ben Hammersley that it's a bit of a false panacea, but I don't know that it is a negative one - so we have it in place. I don't anticipate seeing any results for months (if ever).
For some interesting insights, see this (nofollow) link:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/01/31/link_spamer_interview/
Posted by: Eric Sinclair on February 1, 2005 07:09 AMSo the comment closer (or some variant) worked for you then?
Personally, I don't think that any single thing is going to make a much of a difference in and of itself. I use MT blacklist, and I close the comments on old posts, and I use the IP blocking stuff MT.
In truth though, 98% of my spam problem went away after I started closing the comments on old posts. It kinda sucks, 'cause every once in a while I'd get an interesting comment on a stale old entry, but most of the time it was just :
"Have a bigger weener today through the miracle of Canadian herbal prozac refinancing!"
Yep, the comment closer is working. Like Dr Surly, I feel somewhat sad about it, but in truth very few of the old posts were generating comments. I felt like I was putting three years' worth of comment spam bait out there. It's too bad, but maybe some day a better solution will be found.
Posted by: Anne on February 1, 2005 06:20 PM