Ok, I just spent the last five hour or so dealing with comment spam, basically since my last entry, across the four blogs I have. Lots of fun. Looks like others are getting it too. Sadly, I can’t bill these bastards for my time, though hopefully someday I can take it out of them via a pound of flesh or entrails.
Anyway, some pointers for others who may have been hit by the same thing. Here are the things I have implemented and why.
- Easy removal of new comments via a link sent by email. A good idea but not that helpful if you are hit before you can make the needed changes.
- Mark has a good summary, though I have to admit I didn’t read through the whole thing, as I was looking for a “right now” solution.
- Scriptygoddess has a hack to put all comments in an “incoming” queue. This isn’t done here, but it’s an idea. Unfortunately I don’t think that it will work all that well because the spammers can’t see that their comments aren’t being posted.
- The much touted (after I started looking into these things) MT Blacklist plugin which is coming Monday apparently. The screenshots look good, and match up nicely to what is being requested in the MT support forums.
- Seven quick tips for a spam-free blog was what I did most of my changes from. It has great tips to do things easily. Great post!
Another thing that I found out a bit into my comment deletion was that if you have MT pulling data from a database you can go in and do a “delete from mt_comment where comment_author = ‘whatever’” (you may need to change the WHERE string for your particular pest. I discovered this while I was deleting the comments one by one and after I found I had about 100 more comments to delete. Delete from the database, hit “rebuild all” and they’re all gone.
Hopefully this’ll help people out there, but it’s still a pain in the ass. Maybe I’ll move back to doing it the old way.