Movable Type spam
  • sean gramophonesean gramophone
    There are a couple of threads for fighting off spam on WordPress blogs but I can't find anything about Movable Type. We recently upgraded MT and in so doing broke the captcha plugin we had been using. I've been struggling to get it working again and in the meantime the spam floodgates seem to have opened. Short of forcing TypeKey authentication, does anyone have any suggestions for keeping the Evil Ones out? Thanks in advance.
  • taylor@hypemtaylor@hypem
    i've been having huge problems with this too, in a roundabout kind of way. I'm not getting any spam because im using the mt akismet plugin which is working great for blocking spam, but is so background-process heavy that when my blog is getting hammered it lags my friend who hosts me's ENTIRE server and is the #1 process using the most CPU.



    I've also tried renaming mt-comments.cgi to something else (which is another way to thwart).



    maybe i should turn akismet off and try to find a working captcha?
  • sean gramophonesean gramophone
    I think I'm going to try this:



    http://jayallen.org/projects/comment-challenge/2006/03/introducing_comment_challenge_plugin.php
  • kathrynkathryn
    Sean, your RSS feed indicates you're now on MT 3.33. What version did you upgrade from? And what captcha plug-in were you using? The MT plug-ins directory lists two.



    Also, have you seen this?



    http://www.sixapart.com/pronet/comment_spam
  • sean gramophonesean gramophone
    We were upgrading from 2.66 actually. And were using scode, which isn't being maintained these days.



    Thanks for that link. I had seen the page but didn't find it very useful because it was listing what was available without making firm recommendations, or even making it clear which plugins were valid options (eg: scode, from what I can see).



    Back in the day we used Blacklist, but it really didn't keep the spam out, even when I kept the blacklist up-to-date. A captcha did a much better job (although I regret the accessibility issues, as it long stated in the comments box). I'm not savvy enough to arrange for alternate perl libraries and things to get installed on the server, though, so I can't get the main MT 3.x captcha plugin working.
  • largehearted boylargehearted boy
    I recently upgraded my MT installation and faced the same problems, Sean. MT-Akismet is a wonderful plugin that alleviated most of the comment spam I experienced after my upgrade. Plus, I used some special regular expressions to junk or moderate the "nice blog" spam comments.
  • benlovesmusicbenlovesmusic
    NERDS
  • brandonbrandon
    akismet is the best .. i've used it for wordpress and it stops a LOT of junk
  • JakeJake

    We just started using this on Glorious Noise, and it works great:


    http://alogblog.com/movabletype/plugins/ccode_and_tcode_for_blocking_commenttrackback_spam_for_mt_32/


    It was a little tricky to set up, but I think it does the bulk of the work in javascript on the client side, so the server shouldn't get bogged down.

  • kathrynkathryn
    This may help, as well:



    http://mt-hacks.com/spamfirewall.html
  • donewaitingdonewaiting
    yeah, we just had to shut comments off on donewaiting.com due to MT spam. our hosting provider said it was coming in as fast as a DDOS attack.... so i'm gonna check all this out.



    F U SPAMMERS
  • subinevsubinev
    oh yeah i gotta check out this akismet business. using blacklist and mt moderations just kills all discussion on my site, it doesn't seem to want to let any comments through most of the time!
  • sean gramophonesean gramophone
    for the record, i got Comment Challenge working and spam has reduced to zero. (and there's almost 0 hit on the server, as with Akismet.)
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