Comment Spamming: Pointless Practice
Blogs June 1st, 2004
I couldn’t take it anymore! Last night I took Burningbird’s suggestion and turned-off commenting on any post older than 30 days. I may turn commenting off entirely if this weekend is any indication of the logarithmic growth in comment spamming.
Comment Spammers… why do you bother? You’re not getting any extra PageRank points from your messages due to the external URL redirects MT 2.661 has in place. Plus, thanks to MT-Blacklist, your polution is trashed almsot as quickly as it’s posted.
So I can’t imagine your getting any value from this effort.
Update:
Even after I disabled commenting on old posts, the spammers continued to pound away at the server, yet nothing was actually getting posted.
Pointless (again).
However, this time I decided to let Apache help me rid the server of these digital cockroaches.
A simple .htaccess hack was in order.
I added the following LIMIT Apache directive, which applies only to the HTTP POST method on the mt-comments.cgi file:
<Files mt-comments.cgi>
<Limit POST>
deny from all
</Limit>
</Files>
This effectively (and unfortunately) disables commenting for MovableType at the Apache server level.
I haven’t tested this thoroughly, but it should only disable posting, editing and deleting comments. If not, I’ll fix it, but for now I shouldn’t be getting anymore comments spam.
Related Posts
- Is Comment Spam Cost Effective? -- I’m getting my fair share of comment spam like many other bloggers, but I can’t imagine that the cost/time ratio is actually worth it. I think Sam Ruby sums it up best: “65 minutes to create. Carefully crafted to appear...
- FeedBurner and Me -- I decided to consolidate many of my XML feeds using the excellent FeedBurner service. The process was very simple using Matt’s straight forward tips on redirecting existing feeds to FeedBurner. In addition, I opted to use FeedBurner’s Link Splicer to...
- Google News to RSS -- Julian Bond has a neat little PHP hack that will turn any Google News query into an RSS feed. I’m having a few encoding issues on my server, but for the most part it works well! Thanks Julian! Update: I...
- Apache 2.0 Beats IIS at Its Own Game -- IIS takes another hit: "eWEEK Labs compared the performance of Apache 2.0 and Microsoft Corp.'s Internet Information Services 5.0, both running on Windows 2000 Advanced Server. Apache kept pace with IIS during the entire test, which means that sites that...
- Blog via SMS using Moblogger -- Moblogger: “This application runs as a background process that monitors a POP3 email account for new email, then downloads it, detaches any files such as pictures, sound or video, uses the Blogger API to post the text in the email...
- Spammers Cannibalistic Pyramid Scheme -- Wired News: “The human gene pool should be incapable of producing enough idiots to financially support the vast number of spammers whose scat litters so many inboxes. ” “…most spammers make money selling e-mail addresses to other spammers, who then...
- Movable Type Blog Migration -- Over the last week, usually in the mid-to-late evenings — after Catherine falls asleep, I have been slowly migrating my B2-based blog to Movable Type. I must say that for the most part the process has been fairly straight forward....
About
Leave a Comment