I came home tonight to another 300 pieces of comment spam on the blog.
IreneQ has been hit with hundreds of pieces of comment spam, and like me has begun the tedious task of closing off comment archives. RiverStone has also noticed a spike in comment spam. Both use the MovableType platform.
I still don’t have a good answer to why active blogs are getting hit.
Update: Put in long hours this holiday weekend, and Rachel turned comments off late last night (her midday:^) until I could get some shut eye and sort things out.
The spammers aren’t going to win this one, I suppose there are different ideas and solutions to try, and as more blogs get hit, there will be better solutions for us. Anyway, grabbed some sleep, and opened up comments under recent posts again today.
No one, not even someone running some machine somewhere is going to take away the interactivity that this blog brings. I’m ticked. I lost this blog once because some people see blogs as things. I refuse to let anyone with some list and an eye on the bottom line take my time, peace of mind, effort and the collaborative work that goes into this space.
I’ve been spending my spare time the past month cleaning up, closing off and slogging through help forums instead of enjoying what this blog and this medium is about.
Thanks Rachel, BDBO wouldn’t be here without you, and I’m grateful for the suggestions and feedback other bloggers have given to help get this flooding under control.
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Are you pinging weblogs.com or blo.gs? I would guess that most spambots fetch a list of active blogs from there.
Sorry about the trouble you’re having, and best of luck.
It’s totally automated. Spambots look for blogs and posts that have a
decent Google ranking, then spam heck out of them. The idea is that getting
linked from a high-ranking blog will pull up your own Google rank. In any
case, it’s rarely if ever a deliberate attack on the part of an individual;
instead, they just “unleash the hounds” and let the bot pick the targets
and do the work.
Knowing that it’s not a personal attack can be comforting on one level, but
immensely frustrating on another; after all, you might have dozens of
different spambots trolling your site at once, just because you have a
decent ranking in a search engine. I haven’t posted to my blog in a month,
and I still get hit.
Hope you find a solution that works for you!
I got hit by 400 blogspams the other night. That was the first time it happened in that volume.
I’m not sure if I should be happy or offended. I haven’t been hit by comment spammers at all — yet. Maybe I’m flying below the radar.
Warren…I don’t think it’s about flying below any radar.
I don’t think it’s about blogs with xxx number of visitors either.
I’ve been told it’s the MT platform, it’s random, it’s the price for being online…
I don’t know what to believe.
I hope you are never hit.
It is not only oppressive and discouraging, it’s tedious and annoying.
Christopher…you are the tech whiz…a code in FTP, tightening spam filters closing off archives…tightening html(?) I hope you have better success than I’ve had, and I’m sorry you are getting whalloped too. Hey, blog on!
i got hit hard the other day too. it has been especially hard to handle since I have been on vacation for a week now and 3000 miles from home.
I’ve noticed a few people (like The Green Man) have been removing the “Post” button from the first comment screen, forcing everyone to “Preview” first, the theory being that the extra layer will thwart the robots. I don’t know if it’s been effective or not, however.
If you’re using MT, this plug-in helps:
http://mt-plugins.org/archives/entry/closecomments.php
It closes comments on entries automatically when they age.
the MT blacklist plugin is great. I have been using it for just over a week and it stopped the spam almost dead. One or two messages get through ever now and then, but Blacklist makes it a breeze to get rid of them.
You can download the plugin here
http://www.jayallen.org/projects/mt-blacklist/
Since most spammers are just looking to up their google rating the blacklist plugin blocks links to the website that the spammers are advertizing rather than blocking IP adresses. It works really well and it is super easy to install.
If you are using MT give it a shot. So far I have gone from 300 spams a day to 2 this week… and it only took me 2 seconds to delete them.
Blacklist allows you to delete comments with the plugin instead of having to edit each individual entry. This makes dealing with a huge spam attack that gets through the blacklist really easy. You just get the plugin to dinf the sites that the attack links to, then get it to delete all messages from those sites, then block those sites from ever commenting again. Very quick and easy!
I am using blacklist and I have been very successful. I would guess that is has blocked over 1,000 spam across four different blogs since I installed it.
The attack that I had would have been horrible if I didn’t have blacklist. With it I was able to delete and rebuild all those entries within two minutes.
There really isn’t anything other than that that you could do, however Jonathan’s idea might work and it wouldn’t be all that difficult to implement.