I’m sure anyone who uses MT as their publishing system eventually gets spam bombed. Today, it happened to me. Of course, I’m not one to panic. No. I just get even. I did something nasty to the offending site (FBI be damned!) and hopefully it won’t happen again. In order to ensure that I am left alone, I changed some code in my comment scripts. I know, many of you would suggest MT Blacklist and I considered it for about a milisecond and decided against it.
The easiest thing to do of course is to just force commenters to “preview” their comment before allowing comment submissions. Forcing site visitors to preview their comments before submitting them will not only give them a chance to add error-free comments, but will put yet another hurdle up against automatic comment spam bots.
Even if you’re not very familiar with code, forcing a comment preview is as simple as removing this code:
< input style=”font-weight: bold;” type=”submit” name=”post” value=” Post ” />
from your Individual Entry Archive and your Comment Listing Template.
Easy schmeasy double cheesy!
I hosed myself two weeks ago trying to anti-spam my site.
Ended up having to completely wipe and reinstall, which in the end was something I should have done to being with anyway.
I renamed the comment CGI and changed the conf file and since then I haven’t had a single piece of spam.
Yeah I’m still using the queue feature of MT3.11 but if nothing comes through in a week or so I’ll go back to standard settings.
I’ll keep your idea handy in case I get spammed again.
I’d rather not have the queue but man I was getting 40-50 a day all over the place and had to do something.
Yeah, you’re not the only one…
The only problem I’ve had with the “preview” thing is that sometimes people don’t realize they *haven’t* posted their comment yet. Nevertheless, I am doing preview-first and haven’t had a comment spam in ages.
I am being spammed out the yingyang and spending waaayy too much time deleting this shit. I downloaded Blacklist, read the blurb and almost cried; a master programmer I am not. So, I have now deleted the line you said to delete in the 2 places you said to do so. If this works, I am so very endebted to you. *grin*
I do love PBA!!!!!!!
I found ya by clicking the MTV link at gigglechick’s. Still trying to get that link on my site…It’s a great idea!
But I wanted to thank you for this tidbit about MT because I get spam daily & this’ll really help with the problem! Thanks!
Well, I have done this and it has helped to cut the number of spam posts per day in half; but, some are still getting through. Any idea how they are doing that and is there anything else we can do to stop them, outside of turning off the comment function completely? TIA and thanx much for what you have already done.:)