I haven’t disappeared from the face of the earth, or run my car into a tree, however September has been crazy so far. I’ve also been a bit fed up with the amount of spam being posted to this blog and every time I have intended to post I have gone to my admin pages and found that I have several hundred spam comment posts to delete, by the time I have done that, I’ve forgotten what it was I was going to say! To deal with the problem until I have the time to migrate to WordPress I have turned off comments on all but this latest post.
5 Comments
The quickest way to block spammers in MT is to rename the mt-comments.cgi file to something else, mt-rachel.cgi or mydogatemyshoes.cgi or something. Then open your mt.cfg and scroll down in that, there should be a place to tell it what you’ve renamed the comments file to. (Although I’m not sure what version you’re using, it’s possible you’re on an early one where this option doesn’t exist.)
Another option is to upgrade to v2.661 (which is still available at the MT site and rename the comments script like I’ve described.
A third option is to upgrade to MT v3.11 which has excellent comment approval options, combined with renaming the comments file, can achieve near zero spam.
Of course, as you mentioned, you could switch to WordPress which has similar features. 🙂
(The renaming thing works well because the spammers don’t visit your site, they google for sites that have MT on them, then they use an automated program to send directory to mt-comments.cgi. So if the file is renamed, 404, nothing happens. The spammers don’t bother to check on the 404s, their program just moves on to the next site.)
(And hi! I used to be on the WomenDesigners list a couple years ago, you were/are on that list, iirc, and I was cleaning out my bookmarks and found your edgeofmyseat site and added your blog to my newsreader. My RL name is Stephanie but I used to go by Stevie on the WD list because there was another Stephanie there. :))
When I used MT, the MTBlackList plug in solved 95% of my woes, until one day it started blocking messages that used the letter E! Now that I’m on Textpattern, I’ve not had a single one…
Oh my you deleted mine. I am definitely not a spammer. I was mainly concerned you have posted anything since the driving test. But my post was indeed in between two spammers.
Sorry if I’ve accidentally deleted posts – some days I’ve deleted several hundred spam posts so it was getting difficult to spot the legit posts among all those offering the enlargement of certain parts of ones anatomy.
I’ve been wanting to move to WordPress for a long time, the spam hassle is just making it more of a necessity.
I did both, renaming the comments file worked for a couple of days – then I started getting spam again. In the end I put mtblacklist on the server and that really helped, and its great to see all of those spam hits being rejected.