Today I bit the bullet and bought a license to the latest version of MovableType, the content management system I use for this blog. I'm looking forward to the added security it has for protection from the comment sp*m that has been plaguing the Web. I won't even begin a rant about how much time those f*&kers have wasted of mine. Just this morning I missed a piano lesson in order to clean things up.
So now if you post a comment, and by all means please do, I will need to approve it before it appears. And since I'm generally no further than a foot or so from my computer most of the day, that means your comment will show up within only minutes. This way I can protect everyone from the insidious, disgusting crap that these malicious folks spread daily. Good riddance to bad rubbish.
:sigh: but in today's fast paced world... who has a few minutes to waste while waiting for a comment to stick to the post? =P
I might upgrade one of these days - but im pretty solid against the spam lately.
See, it wasn't so bad. And you don't have to wait for them to post, you know. =P
And that's pretty much how I felt since I had implemented a number of safeguards, like changing the default name of the comment script, and disabling comments for older posts.
Things had been pretty quiet until this morning when a barrage hit like I'd never seen before, and all I could do was disable comments until I had everything cleaned up. Luckily, I was at my computer when it happened. Now that I upgraded and enabled moderated comments, what happened today won't happen again.
Yeah Jay, I just upgraded mine from MT2.5x to MT3.01D, and it's been working out marvelously.. Especially the kick-ass batch 'delete' comment feature.. ooh wee! But since the offical v3.1 will be out late August, you gonna upgrade to that one rather? Cuz that one has the Blacklist!!! Nice!!! I can't wait!
Congrats buddy!
Thanks, Robert. I'll probably stay current with the MT releases since the upgrade process was easy and painless.
As for blacklist, I've got mixed feelings about that. Since most of the comment sp*m comes from zombie bots running on innocent users' machines, there is a (small) chance that banning an IP will prevent a legit user from commenting. That is why I really am liking the control of moderated comments, for now anyway. We'll see how it all works out. So far, so good! =) Cheers!
if you use blacklist correctly, you don't have to actually ban an IP -- for example -- I have regular expression blocks on anyone who uses the word "incest" in a link.. and since that is generally not a topic of discussion on my weblog - it works nicely. Same thing applies to "xxx." and "xxx-" so, if someone has xxx in a link (note the . and the -) it will prolly catch it - -but if someone writes "Dude, I saw some crazy xxx last night" -- it will slide since it doesn't have the whole link syntax.
To sum all that up -
I block about 95% of the spam with my mt-blacklist, and when I do get spam - I can clear it out fast and painless.
..and since I am broke - upgrading is still something that is a big decision... and since I don't get too much spam - it doesn't quite push me to the edge of doing it.
Well, I'm all for filtering to prevent certain topics from being posted, as opposed to blacklisting IPs. I will definitely look into Blacklist once it becomes available.
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