Movable Type Comment Blacklist Plugin Released and Thoughts on Blog Spam

Looks like the MT-Blacklist plugin has been released. Basically it’s an interface for preventing people like the bastard comment spammers from spamming all the blogs out there.

Of course, since my changes the other day I haven’t had a single comment spammed on my site. Of course, I don’t know if that’s because of my changes or because they only used that one or two days to sling a flood of spam out there and now are resting. Of course, the problem with any solution like this is that when “people” (and I use that term lightly) think they have something to gain (ie: pagerank), whether it works or not, are going to go that step further.

I forsee the comment spammers getting smarter, evading the blacklists and filters, and figuring out new ways to do things, maybe using random text along with their porn keywords. The community will respond with better filters and better blacklists, and then the spammers will move ahead, and so on. We’ve seen this with spam for the last few years, and there isn’t an end in sight. There are differences in what BLOG spammers and email spammers have to do though. BLOG spammers are going for pagerank, requiring them to have legible and sensible links created on as many pages they can, while email spammers are looking for clicks to their pages, and the subject, email address and link are hidden in random text, and really don’t matter, as long as suckers click on the link to buy the penis enlargement pills or stock tips or whatever.

This means that there have to be different ways to fight it. Maybe the BLOG spammers will find the community response to fast and furious and will move on to something else. I really hope so, but I have my doubts.

If you do have a movable type blog though, grab the plugin and install it, and lets hope for the best.