Well, I woke up this morning to find that in the hour and a half before getting up I'd received 558 comment-spams, and they were still coming in from multiple IP addresses.
chmod 000 mt-comments.cgi
Having disabled comments, I then start the long process of deleting 558 spams from 36 different posts.
I know, I should be running the latest version of MT2.6 with comment-throttling turned on. I looked into this a while back, It seemed you had to do an awful lot of work1 to get everything working effectively, even significantly more effort than it took to mechanically delete all that spam over breakfast.
What I want is new blogging software. I've wanted it for a while because Moveable type has started to annoy me. To fix the annoyances would involve writing Perl, which always makes me feel dirty2. Now that MT2.6 is a dead-end, and MT3.0 will want to charge me for silly things like adding authors to my Quicklinks blog, the switch seems inevitable.
I shudder at the time I have to invest in moving away from MT. I don't like fiddling around with installation and configuration at the best of times. If I switch, then before I can hack in any improvements, I'm going to have to spend however long it takes getting a new piece of blogging software to get to the state where it does exactly what this one does already: a massive investment of effort to stand in one spot.
Also, I'm way too picky.
- I don't want to switch to another Perl platform. Perl is icky2.
- I don't want to switch to PHP. PHP is truly icky2.
- I can't really spare the server resources for a Java appserver.
- I don't want to switch to anything that won't let me keep my permalink URLS exactly as they are (no more redirects thankyou, I still have to maintain all the annoying redirects from when I last moved my blog).
Hello Inertia, my old friend.
1 Hopefully, Shelley won't get too worried when a Google search for "Burningbird throttling" shows up in her referrer logs.
2 This is my opinion. You're welcome to your own, differing opinion so long as you don't feel that your opinion invalidates my right to have one.
Why not... replace mt-comments.cgi with a proxy cgi of your own, which would then first run the spam through SpamAssassin and only submit the message to the real mt-comments.cgi if it's not deemed spammy enough?
MT-Blacklist?
I was getting a whole bunch of spam, but since installing it I've been clean for a while now.
MT-blacklist was good for me too. But 288? Dude!
Since moving off MT, I haven't had a single blogspam. It could be because the comment spammers particularly like MT, but more likely because Google has yet to calculate pagerank for the new URLs.
Pilgrim seems to have transitioned fairly quickly:
http://diveintomark.org/archives/2004/05/14/freedom-0
"This site now runs WordPress. Thanks to the wonderful people on the #wordpress IRC channel, I was able to migrate almost all of my complex Movable Type configuration, including custom URLs (so permalinks shouldn’t break, and you won’t need to resubscribe to my syndicated feeds)."
MT-Blacklist get a thumbs-up from me too. The volume of comment-spam has been reduced significantly since I took that relatively painless step.
Stewart - Wordpress is PHP - see the second bullet point in the requirements list.
Personally I like PHP (and wordpress) but I'm just an admin type who codes a bit in self defence, not a real coder like our host :)
I'm trying to find something Ruby based to move away from blosxom (b/c it's Perl and makes me feel dirty :-)
PyBlosxom! (It's the first several hits in Google.)
It's not Perl or PHP or Java, it's Python. Your permalinks should still work. There is a tool to convert entries from MT (I'm not sure if it comes with, but if not, I'ld email it to you.) And finally, it's just about to get a 1.0 release which adds static rendering. If you need help setting it up, there's a small but helpful set of people in #pyblosxom on irc.freenode.org, as well as pyblosxom-users and pyblosxom-devel lists at sourceforge. Or ask me (through email or IM), and I'll see what I can do to help.
(For Greg, why don't you move to a Ruby-based blosxom, i.e. "Cherry Blosxom", "Blogtari!", or "Gemcast"?)
quick steps which solved my comment spam method:
-instead of manually deleting, login to db and run sql script
delete from mt_comments where comment_url like 'xxx';
-rename mt_comments.cgi to mt_xxx.cgi and change the templates accordingly
since a few weeks comment spam free ...
Oliver, instead of renaming mt-comments.cgi and changing your templates, you should be able to change it in your mt.cfg. There's parameters that allow you to change each of the mt cgi scripts:
# By default, the script that Movable Type uses for comments is called
# mt-comments.cgi, the TrackBack script is called mt-tb.cgi, the
# search engine script is called mt-search.cgi, the XML-RPC server
# script is called mt-xmlrpc.cgi, and the dynamic blog view script is
# called F. In
# some situations--for example, if you are running MT under mod_perl, or if
# your server requires that your Perl scripts have the extension .pl--you
# may need different names for these scripts. You can set the names that will
# be used throughout the default templates and Movable Type code by changing
# these values.
#
# CommentScript mt-comments.pl
# TrackbackScript mt-tb.pl
# SearchScript mt-search.pl
# XMLRPCScript mt-xmlrpc.pl
# ViewScript mt-view.pl