stinkin comment spam
Thanks to a heads up yesterday from Jed, I discovered that my site (or at least the comments theron) had been vandalized by online gambling spam…So I had to turn on comment moderation for the time being until I figure out a better way to stop the spam. I’m guessing that the spambots post directly to the main comments script, so the fix may be as simple as renaming that script. We’ll see. So…when and if your comments don’t show up immeadiately, don’t fret. They’ll show up eventually.
Peace.
Don’t know if you’re running your own server and can run mod_perl access handlers, but if you are I have a solution you can use that’s been pretty effective so far.
Yeah – I am running my own server. Apache-2.0.49 at this point. Your mod_perl solution seems interesting…I sat in on a mod_perl class at OSCON this summer and was really intrigued by the immense flexibility and power you can gain over apache by using mod_perl. Until taking the class, I thought it was just a replacement for perl/cgi :-)
I’m actually thinking about just renaming the script that the comments are posted to. I’m guessing that will eliminate most of the spam, as I’m guessing that the spam is posted by scripts that call the default php files of wordpress/movable type/etc.
Yea, my solution was for people who didn’t want to modify their blogging software (either renaming or just changing form field names would probably work). As for mod_perl, a couple years back I bought “Writing Apache Modules with Perl and C” (an O’Reilly book), and have discovered it’s one of the ones that never seems to stay in my office due to everyone trying to figure out how to do interesting stuff in apache. I really like the ability to transparently rewrite content and do verification/redirecting without actually needing to touch the site’s code.
From what I can tell, most of the comment spam is coming from just a few IP addresses. I may just deny those addresses htaccess-stylee.
It’s not elegant, but it’ll work for now.