More comment spam grousing

SixApart says the following about comment spam:

We're in the process of identifying all the separate issues involved, coming up with some concise and effective recommendations, and then outlining our plan going forward. We're also going to be reaching out to the weblog community as a whole with information we've learned from both our experience with Movable Type and our background in running the TypePad service. There are a variety of ways to deal with spam, ranging from technical to legal to social methods, and we'll discuss them all.

That post links to others here, here, and here. (Note to Ben Hammersley: If you change the "de.com" entry in your blacklist to be either "\bde.com" or "\.de.com", you'll still block what I presume you intended to block without zapping sites like "photodude.com". Just FYI.)

I actually thought things had been easing up around here, as I've only had to de-spam a handful of onesy-twosie comments this week. Then I logged into my domain host to check my status and found the following general announcement:

Posted: Dec 15th, 2004 - 04:06:31 PM PST (3 hours 6 mins ago)

We have seen a significant increase in weblog comment spam lately. Movable Type installations seem to be the worst hit, but Greymatter is also affected. The increase in comment spam has been causing a lot of server instability. We have begun blocking connections from the IP addresses we have found to be the origins of most of the spam, but that will most likely only work temporarily. We request that everyone with a weblog application installed please do what you can to reduce the likelihood of your site being a target. Install any applicable anti-spam plugins or disable comments on your weblog altogether. Let us know if you have any questions.

Well. Maybe their preemptive IP blocking has helped, but as they say, that ain't a permanent fix. I'm well under my allowable bandwidth usage, but as noted elsewhere, that'll be cold comfort if someone on the same shared server as me causes a crash. And I still am racking up the spam kills:

Comment spams blocked:         50977

Comment spams moderated:        6274

That's since November 19. Let's just say I look forward to SixApart's promised discussions.

(BTW, if you're a Nucleus user, comment spam has invaded your turf now, too. Kevin has some help for you.)

UPDATE: Via Michael, we have an important update on the situation from Jay Allen, who is the new Product Manager for Movable Type (congrats!) at SixApart. I'll be looking for their patch soon.

UPDATE: And more from Jay.

Posted by Charles Kuffner on December 15, 2004 to Administrivia | TrackBack