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October 13, 2003

Lolita, preteen

Lolita, preteen: Spam in blog comments reached new heights this weekend... I heard of several sites that got "hundreds" of blog entries spammed with porn ads under the names "lolita" and "preteen". In the Flash community Sam Wan and Michael Gunn both got hit hard... some of the political blogs have closed down comments and are mobilizing to block further attacks. For Movable Type a lot of the attention seems to be around Jay Allen's plugin, and after a bit of forum debate there's an entry at SixApart today on the subject. (Two weeks ago I removed comment entry forms from old pages, but the addresses are still exposed... I'm getting much less new spam, but am still having to remove a few comments a day here, and I'm probably vulnerable to an automated attack too.)

Posted by John Dowdell at October 13, 2003 05:15 PM

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Comments

I got hit hard today, a bunch of spams got through before I could block the ip. But thanks to running my blog with MySQL, I could simply do a SQL query to get rid of all the spam originating from the ip-address being used.

It's nice to see that Six Apart is getting involved in the issue, and that solutions are starting to surface. It seems to me like a good solution would be to make available several ways of combating spam. The most exciting one so far is Jays proposed spam-blocking network over XML-RPC - sounds like a great idea that I hope will be reality very soon.

Posted by: Jarle at October 13, 2003 06:35 PM

I got hit aswell.

It would be great if someone could write a hack for MT that allows you to not only delete each individual comment, but also delete based on email?

Infact, MT should release a new build with anti-spam features in place, and provide it as a "dontation only" addon. Hell I'd pay.

I'm a CFMX proggy and Php is easy to follow, but MT is over my head in regards to behind the scenes logic.

Posted by: Scott Barnes at October 13, 2003 07:03 PM

I researched some useful info a long time ago about spamming blogs.

Here is the link to some possible solutions:
http://www.moik78.com/2003_04_01_moik78_archive.html#200095459

Posted by: Moises at October 14, 2003 12:33 AM