Comment Spamming: Pointless Practice

hatch

June 1, 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.