This is not good.
I’ve come to wonder whether the problems I’ve had with MySQL errors on Barbelith over the last couple of years have been more to do with comment spam than anything else, and – while I want to make it clear that in no way do I blame Six Apart or Movable Type or anything and while I’m sure there’s a way out of this situation – it has started to feel like having the mt-comments.cgi script sitting on my server is like having a bullseye painted on my chest.
If Tom Coates can’t deal with comment spam on MT, then how are others less capable than him dealing with this?
re-naming the mt-comments.cgi script is a common move. Tom I wish you luck and I worry now about my own blog….
What has been killing my server? (plasticbag.org)
I’m doing that renaming now, and it’s helping considerably. I don’t know that it’s sustainable, but it’s a good start.
The state of affairs with comment spam on MT is pretty bad. I generally recommend people moving to WordPress for more reasons than just comment spam but in this case one of the best solutions available is to use a plug-in designed to combat comment spam.
Akismet, the comment spam fighting plug-in for WordPress, is also available for MovableType. I use it on a number of blogs and it catches the vast majority of spam, with exception here and there. Grab it here: http://akismet.com/blog/2006/04/for-mt/
Ultimately, I have to ask out of genuine curiosity: what keeps you on MT?
I second Scott. WP+Akismet work great. Btw, there is also an (experimental) Akismet plugin for MT.
Hmm – it’s eh… still early in the morning. Scott already told you about the MT Akismet plugin. Sorry for repeating.
“what keeps you on MT?”
Good question.
Loyalty to the application as it was the first real weblog application on the market back when I switched off of Winer’s Weblogs.com/Frontier mess.
Loyalty to friends at 6A.
And finally the recommendations from people who run much bigger sites than mine or Tom Coates’, people who have run many different kinds of weblog apps, and who tell me that MT is still the best. Granted these people tweak the hell out of MT in order to secure it and whatnot…
Right on. I completely understand loyalty to a product and the friends that work on it and advocate for it.
In that case, I once again recommend making use of the experimental Akismet plug-in for MT. It is, by far, the best way to eradicate comment spam at the moment. While I use it on WordPress I have heard that it does great things for MT.
Good Day,
A few years back at my MT site I wrote a few posts on e-mail spam and within hours I was getting burried with comment spam. I did the renaming and a few other things. The one that seemed to help the most was to put another field in the form. The field did nothing but confuse bots. I also use CCode and Tcode. I have not tried the Askimet yet. Currently Spam is minimal.
I also work with WordPress and Nucleus. For those sites I use a Captcha and have few problems. There is, ironically, another site I work on (radiostatic.am) that is getting killed with comment spam. It is odd. We use akimet and a captcha over at the wordpress radiostaic site. It makes little sense to us there is no real difference in traffic or anything else.
This is, unfortuantley, part of the blogin and podcasting turf.