Al-Muhajabah's Movable Type Tips

Update: Jay Allen's MT-Blacklist makes most of this entry obsolete, but I am keeping it around for reference purposes.

In the last week or two, there has been an epidemic of comment spam to MT blogs. It appears to be done by automated scripts. The most notorious of the spammers links to a hardcore pr0n site.

Various people are coming up with ways for bloggers to fight back. Inshallah, I will be implementing some or all of these. I've started with Stepan Riha's blacklist hack. What this does is prevent submission of comments that contain URLs on the blacklist. It does not prevent new comment spam (i.e., with new URLs that are not on the blacklist) from being posted but once you've identified a spammer, you can prevent the comments from even being posted to your system so you don't have to clean them out later. This does require keeping the blacklist manually updated and of course it involves altering the MT source code so it may not be for everybody, but I think it's an essential part of the anti-spam toolkit.

Jay Allen is preparing MT-Blacklist, a plugin that will hide block all comments with blacklist URLs in them; this is somewhat redundant with Stepan's hack but doesn't require altering the MT source code and promises to offer a much better user interface.

Another type of solution is aimed at preventing automatic script submission of comment spam. James Seng has a plugin that requires commentors to type in a security code from an image file. Another idea is Shelley Powers's hidden form field. I have not yet implemented either of these as I am examining them further [ed. note: I subsequently implemented the SCode plugin].

You should also implement this hack to your comment notifications, which adds a link you can follow to immediately delete any spam comments that you find [ed. note: MT-Blacklist has a feature that makes this obsolete]