Clamping down on comment spammers
As I’ve “written about before”:http://www.johnsjottings.com/archives/2003/09/04/comment_spam_solutions.html comment spamming is becoming a serious problem. After getting almost a dozen of them today I realized a couple of things:
# Movable Type needs a power editing mode for comments (already has one for entries).
# Time to automate removal of spam comments.
Coincidently I had recently been asked by Jay Allen for my opinion on his solution for addressing comment spam. In “Killing Comment Spam Dead”:http://www.jayallen.org/journey/2003/09/killing_comment_spam_dead and “Killing Comment Spam for Dummies”:http://www.jayallen.org/journey/2003/09/killing_comment_spam_for_dummies Jay outlines a very inventive approach for resolving this problem - maintaining a blacklist of urls and modifying the Movable Type templates to filter out comments that reference a banned url. Comment still actually gets entered, but nobody would know but me.
Jay’s instructions are easy to follow and I was up and running within 30 minutes or so. I did have a problem initially until I realized that the MTIfNotMatches tag needs to be all on one line. Once I got that cleaned up it worked like a charm. Ran through each of Jay’s test cases and passed with flying colors. Additionally I went ahead and applied the code toward trackbacks as well, knowing full well that sort of spam is coming too.
I still think a central server to manage known spammer URLs is needed but in the meanwhile I’m happy to modify my blacklist as I read about spammers or see them on my site.
Bring on the spam, spammers!
Now that is a very inventive approach, I am just sad that it has to come to this. My traffic is minor so I have not had any comment spamming yet.
So the race between spammers and bloggers is on. In my worst nightmare I see bloggers applying same spam content filtering (Bayesian filters, keywords, etc) as we are forced for our precious emails.
you can use something like http://ownDomain/redirect.php?input=http://www.x.y“
in your template
and
in the script something like
header(”location: $eingabe”);
so they will not get PR from the link