According to the nifty MT Blacklist main page, which is integrated into MT 3.x, I’ve blocked or deleted over 30,000 comment spams, all (presumably) since I upgraded to MT 3.121 on November 19. That’s over 2000 a day. I’m in awe.
Now, I used to get plenty of comment spam before the upgrade, but I didn’t think it was that much, though with MTB 1.65 there was no way to keep count. It does seem like many of the rejected comments contained domains which I had previously blocked via wide-ranging regular expressions (variants of “texas holdem” being the big offenders; the MTB upgrade apparently ignores any personalizations you’d made to the Master Blacklist, so the recent big spammers appear explicitly), so maybe I was getting attacked with that kind of fervor but was blissfully unaware of it.
However you slice it, anyone who is not using MTB is a sitting duck. The new built-in interface, with automated blacklist updating and forced moderation of multiple comments and comments on old posts, is worth the price of the MT upgrade by itself. If you’re on the fence about upgrading Movable Type, that right there is the best reason I can give you to do it.
It’s so bad that twice recently, sustained attacks have overwhelmed our teeny little server and I’ve had to reboot it.
I’m wondering if it’s time to rename my mt-comment.cgi
I’ve had two of my sites get over 1000+ spams in a day. I suspect I’ll see all or most of them get similar hits.
I haven’t seen a total at the bottom of the page, so I have no idea where you folks are getting your counts, but it’s been astonishingly high, I agree.
Take a look at the pending comments once in a while, too…I keep seeing ones from spammers which never turn up on the blog or in my mail.
MT-BLACKLIST STATS
Comment spams blocked: 123
Comment spams moderated: 110
That’s since 11/14, and my little website doesn’t get that manny visitors.
Linkmeister, from the MTB Main Menu, there’s a bos to the right that says “MT-Blacklist News” and another underneath it that says “MT-Blacklist Stats”. What Sue pasted in above is the first two lines of the stats. Mine says:
Comment spams blocked: 29120
Comment spams moderated: 1183
which means I had a relatively quiet night last night.
It comes in spurts, but when spammers attack my little dog-and-pony show I get in the neighborhood of 200-300 attempted spam comments at a pop. It seems to correspond with posting frequency. On a week where I post multiple times, I usually get an attempted spam attack.
BTW, no to be too nit-picky, but I gotta do a plug… WordPress also has pretty robust comment spam blocking plug-ins and comment moderation. As often as I get hit with these attacks none of these spam comments have actually made it onto my site. Makes you wonder why the buffoons keep trying.
Mine comes in spats too. 4,714 blocked since moving to the most recent version of MT. For me, the comment spam picked up within hours of our switch to the new version.
One tool that’s cut down a lot of my spam is the Conversation Killer plugin created by one of my friends:
http://mt-plugins.org/archives/entry/conversation_killer.php
It allows you to close comments on posts once they reach a certain age (of your choosing). Seems to help a lot…
Thanks, Charles. I wonder if I’m so far left I don’t look at the right side of the page? 😉