Month: October 2004

Nifty little bit of PHP code here to show your MT-Blacklist stats on the front page of your blog. Probably not going to do it myself, but thought it worth passing along.

Jay Allen has resurfaced, noting again his super-saturation with non-MT-Blacklist activities (not least of which is moving from Budapest to California). He does point out something re MT-B I’d not picked up on before (bolding mine):

Lee’s comment reminded me that a major change from MT-Blacklist v1 to v2 may not be obvious to some users. Despite the history and name of MT-Blacklist, I have never been completely happy with a blacklist solution. I have said on many occasions that a permanent, ever-growing and central blacklist is not the correct or final solution. It is for this reason that I introduced Max URL and old entry comment moderation.

These two features allow you to force into comment moderation (the comment awaits the blog owner’s approval) any post that (a) has more than X links inside of it, or (b) is on a comment older than Y days (and hasn’t had a comment in Z days). I have both of these features turned on here at DDtB (and actually had one of my own comments moderated the other day for excess URLs).

By themselves, these two features will keep a huge majority of spam off of your site without the need for a single entry in your blacklist.

Yup.

Since the spam is force moderated and never appears on your site, you don’t even need to worry about de-spamming until you feel like going in and batch deleting all of them via the Comments tab in the admin interface. Or you can do the first step of the despam process using the link in the notification email, to delete the comment and send in a report to the Clearinghouse, but skip the second step of adding the domain to your blacklist entirely.

I’m not sure I agree with this last point. While blacklisting URLs cannot be the only solution, it’s a quick and valuable one, and I have no qualms about adding that sort of thing to my own blacklist.

Btw, while you can batch delete comments in the new Comments tab in MT3, you can also (via a tiny little link at the bottom of that page) treat them as spam and delete/report them that way, too. You still need to explicitly identify which of them are spam (and which might be comments moderated inadvertently or for other reasons).

Essentially, the only time you really need to de-spam is when spam evades both of the above measures or if you are getting massively attacked by a certain spammer and want to blacklist them just to kill off their submissions entirely. These actively and recently spammed domains are really now the only ones you need on your blacklist.

I’m not sure that “old” domains can be so easily discarded (if that becomes the standard, then the Bad Guys will just recreate their old domains).

What I still miss is a “bulk despam” function like MT-B v1 had (apply the blacklist to the last X entries). Jay noted, in response to my question about this, that it’s a feature still on the list of things to do, but the move (and other issues) are still keeping him from it. I look forward to the function being added, and am still (looking at my blacklist log) thankful I have this invaluable tool.

Jay, who’s now going to work for SixApart, also commented, re MT licensing:

However, I will point out that I know of some people who believe that the licenses require them to pay when in fact, they do not. In other words, there is some leftover misinformation from the whole licensing fiasco.

If you run a non-profit multi-author blog (or any type that requires payment) you should contact 6A to get better (read: perhaps $0) licensing terms. They’ve asked people to do that because they aren’t in the business of milking those who are doing good and interesting things but can’t pay.

Something to consider.

I’m annoyed.

Of the 40 pieces of e-mail in my inbox at the office this morning, 35 of them were spam, as filtered (once I told it to) by IHateSpam. That doesn’t count the 260-odd filtered by our corporate anti-spam gateway. And it doesn’t count the additional 3 I had to manually filter.

So of about 300 e-mail sent to my inbox after I left for the day Friday, two were legit.

*sigh*

Meanwhile, over on the blog side of things, things are getting worse.

The biggest problem is that the newest version of MTBlacklist, for all its slick interface and automatic update of signatures and keen stuff like that (and, make no mistake, the slickness and automation and keenity are indeed worthwhile) doesn’t have a “de-spam” option any more (i.e., “I’ve made a couple of updates to the blacklist, now see if there are any other lurking comments out there that have those strings”). So, if you get bombarded by fifty spam comments, all with the same evil URL in them, and you clean one through MTBlacklist — you still have to clean the rest through MTBlacklist, too.

You can mitigate this, slightly, by forcing moderation on comments on old posts (like I have), but that only keeps the suckers from showing up online, not from folks putting them in.

(Another disad to the newest MTBL appears to be that the MTBlacklist code doesn’t rebuild the main index. It’ll rebuild the individual entries just fine, but the main index is not rebuilt — which means if you list recent comments on your index, the spam comments will still show up there, even after getting zapped.)

Of course, MTBL is still blocking a lot more than gets through, and it makes removing it relatively simple (if, at the moment, tedious), so I’m not anticipating getting rid of it, by an means. God, no.

On top of this, I’m now getting nassssty trackback spam as well. MTBL flags that, too, but it can’t be moderated at the moment.

And, even more bizarre, I’m getting a lot of comment spam now with nonsense URLs — “htmlrxjxoralmth.com” for example. Not a valid domain. So, what’s the point? Probing for weaknesses? Trying to overload the system or fill up the blacklists with nonsense strings to make everything run slower? Feh.

Well, I’m making a couple of changes that will hopefully reduce the onslaught. I’ve kept some older blogs open to comments to act as “honey pots,” but it’s taking so long to clean the buggers, screw it. I’m blocking further comments in some older inactive blogs (easy to do in MT3). In another blog (IDC) where there’s still occasional activity, I’m now requiring TypeKey registration (which may or may not keep out the comment spammers, but I’ll see).

As for the main blogs — I’ll just have to keep my eye open on them. Dagnabbit.

(Oh, and, for the record? I consider canned “Hey, vote for [fill in the candidate of your choice]!” comments from strangers to be comment spam, too, and they’ll be blacklisted — which may lead to your linked sites being automatically blacklisted at other blogs, too, which would be counterproductive to your cause, I’d think. You’ve been warned.)