Introduction to spam fighting
As you may know there is a lot of discussion going on out there regarding blog comment spam. In my opinion comment spam can be defined as a comment posted to a blog wich is not related with the content of your post. It will include a link in the comments field or in the name of the author to a commercial website. The problem is becoming serious as spammers are developing bots that can make dozens of post in an hour. We must stop this now or weīll be the third spam generation victims after mail boxes and guestbooks.
Blog comment spam canīt be comprared yet with his big brother “email” but there is enough presence to be considered as a danger. MT doesnīt help too much cleaning your articles from spamming post so if you donīt want to spend an hour each day doing blog cleaning I recommend you to take action right now. They use bots to kill your blog but you donīt have a cleaning bot, remewmber this!. We must hit asap before this becomes a major problem. Some blacklists are ready to use and other methods are a good starting point. I have collected here some methods and solutions that blog owner are developing. Iīll add a brief description of each method and a link to the authorīs website where you ca find more info. I donīt want to infright copyrighted material so you must get the original content from the authoreīs website.
Spam prevention is easy, some quick solutions can save your Movable Type blog from the spam plague. All the solutions I have posted here are specific for MT, Iīll try to add stuff for other blog types, sorry!. With one of this methods you can avoid most of blog spamm comments, and is very simple in case of bots, letīs go!
Email spamming is much easier than blog spamming, this is our first advantage. If a spammer wants to get an email in your inbox, he only needs your email address but if a spammer wants to get inside your blog he needs some extra effort: visit your blog and find the comment script page, then submit a post. As they use bots specifically designed for base MT installations we must change this structure as much a possible in order to increase the difficult of posting.
I recommend you to start with the easiest ones, and if they don’t keep the spammers away then try to add the advanced solutions, the reward worth the effort, so take action.