Temporary Comment Shutdown Due to Spam
posted by Daniel Solove
A new spambot has been hitting us hard lately, and has hit us particularly hard today. I’ve thus shut down comments to the entire blog.
We currently use the Akismet plugin for Movable Type, and I find that it still misses many spams and goes through periods where it seems helpless against certain spam bots. It also can be hyperactive at times, junking legitimate comments.
We’ve fretted over what to do about the spam comment problem. We’ve thus far been unable to install a CAPTCHA plugin, and we currently don’t know of a way to have registered commenters. Does anybody have any ideas about a solution? Please email me if you have any ideas, as you cannot comment to this post until I reopen comments — probably not until tomorrow.
UPDATE: I’ve reopened comments again and hope that the bot has run its course.
June 6, 2007 at 8:12 pm
Posted in: Administrative Announcements
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Responses (7)
James Grimmelmann - June 7, 2007 at 1:20 am
The Akismet plugin is astonishingly good at stopping comment spam. I use it and am well satisfied.
Kaimi - June 7, 2007 at 4:10 am
Dan,
I’m working on a fix, which will hopefully be in place soon.
In the interim, we got hit again, and so I changed comments to auto-moderation. They’re not blocked, but they won’t show until we let them out of moderation.
Daniel J. Solove - June 7, 2007 at 9:11 am
James,
We already have Akismet, but this spammer is getting through quite easily.
Dan
James Grimmelmann - June 7, 2007 at 10:51 pm
Interesting. My dinky lil’ blog must be not worth the effort for the spammers.
Michael Lee - June 10, 2007 at 11:13 pm
I’m in your boat. Spam bastards have essentially shut down my interactivity. I’ll be watching your site to see how you overcome the problem. Good luck.
Michael Lee
Kaimi - June 13, 2007 at 7:17 pm
TESTING COMMENT FUNCTIONALITY.
Kaimi - June 13, 2007 at 7:23 pm
ONE MORE TEST.
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