June 15, 2004
You Want Comment? NO COMMENT FOR YOU!
I'm not sure if the everyday or casual reader notices this, but occasionally, this site gets hit by comment spam. I've got MT-Blacklist installed, which blocks a lot of it and makes things very easy to delete, but on occasion, things still slip through. With Blacklist, I get this strange pleasure of putting people onto my blacklist and deleting the comments, but also the pleasure of seeing all the rejected comments in my activity log. I know, I'm crazy, but it's kind of fun.
There was one time when Gothamist was attacked by spam over and over again for what had to be over 200 comments on several different entries. You would ban one URL and another one would show up. It was non-stop. Finally, we added the domain (they kept using subdomains) and all their comments were blocked. That was so fun it's disturbing. Such an adrenaline rush. It's almost like it was a fight between good (me) and the evil spambots.
One particularly bad offender on this site was using the 'hrie@yahoo.com' e-mail address. Said bot/person kept spamming my site over and over, using different I.P. addresses and different sites. Finally, I just decided to ban the email address and it's blocked all spam from that address. While there is still the occasional comment spam, it's much better now.
Posted by tien mao in Blog-ing at 8:48 AM
Before I had blacklist, I was hit with 700 spams over a 10 minute period. It was awful.
My MT is still all screwed up (not from that) and won't rebuild the old stuff, so a lot of my spam remains...I had to manually close a lot of my comments because of it.
Posted by: corie at June 15, 2004 9:44 AM
I guess that's the downside of having a 'comments' feature on your site. Sounds annoying. I hate spam... I'd also hate myself if I didn't let you know about these great prices on Xa*nax, Cial*is, Vi*agra and more! Click on the link below to get in on these great deals!! ;)
Posted by: matt at June 15, 2004 10:05 AM
how do you block by email address? i never figured that out...
Posted by: dahl at June 15, 2004 11:04 AM
dahl, i just added the email address instead of adding the url. it seems to work the same way. you have to be sure not to add yahoo.com though otherwise you'll block everything from there.
Posted by: tien at June 15, 2004 11:08 AM
why does this happen? are the spam attacks directed or is it the work of a spambot? and if so, what are they trying to accomplish? it's like at first spam was just nuisance advertising, but nowadays it seems to have life of its own. it wants to live dammit!
Posted by: ChrisG at June 15, 2004 11:08 AM
i think most of the time they are the work of a spambot since they comments have nothing to do with the entries at all. why they do it is another question.
i guess there are several reasons. the more links they have out there, the higher they rank on google. if they spam-bomb enough sites, they might get ranked on a site like blogdex, and there are a lot of sites that are no longer maintained so i'm sure those get hit with spam as well.
Posted by: tien at June 15, 2004 11:12 AM
hrie@yahoo is a frequent visitor of my site as well. I'm actually considering trying out WordPress on a testing basis. I haven't looked into whether they have any sort of spam blocking superpowers yet though. That might be a showstopper.
Anyone know?
ha! I got blocked because I mentioned the email address. oops.
Posted by: KP at June 15, 2004 11:55 AM
Ah the dreaded fucking hrie comment spammer. I think I have got that bot under control.
Posted by: Keith at June 15, 2004 11:57 AM
I'm so glad you posted this, Tien. I just installed MT-Blacklist. Took like 15 minutes. Can't wait to see it start blocking spam comments.
Posted by: Adam at June 15, 2004 3:29 PM
This guy has a pretty funny post on hrie@yahoo.c0m:
http://www.parkwayreststop.com/archives/000678.html
Posted by: witz at June 15, 2004 4:23 PM
I heart MT Blacklist. If I can blacklist just one site, I feel my work has been done.
Posted by: Jen at June 15, 2004 6:35 PM
Jen: I heart MT Blacklist. If I can blacklist just one site, I feel my work has been... {read on}
witz: This guy has a pretty funny post on hrie@yahoo.c0m: http://www.parkwayreststop.... {read on}
Adam: I'm so glad you posted this, Tien. I just installed MT-Blacklist. Took like 15 m... {read on}
Keith: Ah the dreaded fucking hrie comment spammer. I think I have got that bot under c... {read on}
KP: hrie@yahoo is a frequent visitor of my site as well. I'm actually considering tr... {read on}
tien: i think most of the time they are the work of a spambot since they comments have... {read on}
ChrisG: why does this happen? are the spam attacks directed or is it the work of a spamb... {read on}
tien: dahl, i just added the email address instead of adding the url. it seems to wor... {read on}
dahl: how do you block by email address? i never figured that out...... {read on}
matt: I guess that's the downside of having a 'comments' feature on your site. Sounds... {read on}