Fight spam before it starts

October 19, 2003 | View Comments (7) | Category: Whitespace

Summary: How I am going to stop spam at the gate.

My last blog is still receiving comments spam and it is getting pretty irritating deleting those comments. All of the spam occurs on entries that are a couple of months old. The blog was not that big so I could only imagine how the big boys are dealing with comment spam. Instead of waiting to take action on the spam when it occurs, I am going to take care of it before it starts.

Since I post at least 5 times a week on this blog, entries that are over a week old pretty much get pushed to the back of my mind and the discussions carry on to the new entries. It seems my readers follow the same patterns. After a couple of days entries stop receiving comments, because I could only assume that people are also moving on to new discussions.

When you go to a site such as StopDesign or Simple Bits you will find long discussions because 1) they get a crazy amount of people to their sites' and 2) they only post every couple of days so discussions can develop over that time period. The thing is after the first day, very rarely will I go through and read all the comments. That is just me though I guess.

So with all of this in my mind I am implementing an unspoken rule here (although now it will be spoken). I will close comments for entries that are two weeks old. This just means that every Sunday I have to go to entries posted 2 weeks previous to the current one and close comments on at most 7 entries. That is really no big deal and I will certainly do that if it prevents the spam from coming. This also saves me from responding to comments on entries that are weeks to months old when the person who made the comment may never come back to that entry again. I always feel sorry for those people who post in really old entries anyways because it reminds me of the question: If a tree falls in the middle of a forest and no one is around to hear it does it make a sound (or something like that)? If you come across an entry where the comments are closed and really have something important to say, feel free to email me. Now back to the discussions.

Trackback URL: http://9rules.com/cgi-bin/mt/mt-tb.cgi/32

Comments

#1

As for your old blog, you might just want to close comments on all entries, period. Since you're just leaving it up for archival purposes, I doubt there is much merit in leaving the comments open. Sadly, I don't know of a quick way to do this job, since MT's Power Editing mode for entries doesn't allow the comment status of an entry to be changed.

If you're using a MySQL backend, maybe you could create a simple SQL query, which will find entries for the specified week, and then close all of their comments? Maybe if you couple this with the mt-rebuild plugin (http://mt-plugins.org/archives/mini/mtrebuild.php), that would give you a semi-automatic way of closing comments each week.

milbertus (http://www.milbertus.com)

#2

Doh! Looks like MT's auto-linking screwed the URL up. Here's what it should be:

http://mt-plugins.org/archives/mini/mtrebuild.php

milbertus (http://www.milbertus.com)

#3

Why not just use something like MTBlacklist?

http://www.jayallen.org/projects/mt-blacklist/v1.0b/index

Derek (http://www.twotallsocks.com)

#4

Derek: Yeah I saw that, but I also have other reasons for closing comments like just entries being so old that they should not receive any more comments. It is not like anyone is going to know when a new comment is posted for these old entries, unless I show the most recent comments, which I am not going to do.

milbertus: Yeah it is easier if you are using MySQL backend, but I just do not have the time to go into doing something like that, even though I could see it taking all a couple of minutes. Same amount of time it takes to click "close" in the comments box. I will have to check into the mtrebuild plugin sometime though.

Scrivs (http://www.9rules.com/whitespace/)

#5

Interesting.I don't use MT so I've no input on that... but are you getting much referer spam? I know we get loads of it here, even with all the filters I put in my error reporter I still get 20 or so a day.

JC (http://www.thelionsweb.com/weblog)

#6

I haven't gotten any hear for two reasons

1. The site is not that old.

2. I have been closing the comments on the old entries anyways.

It seems the spammers try to find heavily linked entries that are old where people might miss them, except for Google.

Scrivs (http://www.9rules.com/whitespace/)

#7

Actually I meant the referer spam... that's where you look in your logs and see a ton of 'referrals' from porn sites, usually accompanied by 404 errors. They're trolling for blogs and other websites that show 'last x referers' in hopes that they'll be able to advertise their porn sites, and I suppose they might hope to get some traffic from the referral log readers, too.

JC (http://thelionsweb.com/weblog)

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