The Spammers May Be Winning

I continue to be vexed by spammers exploiting the Subscribe To Comments hack by ScriptyGoddess.  Apparently, someone has designed a robot which opens a specific entry, enters an email address, selects the "subscribe" radio button, then "clicks" the submit button, adding the email address to the subscription list.  Unfortunately, the existing Subscription hack does not integrate with MT-Blacklist, so even if the actual comment gets blocked, the subscription gets through.

As a bandaid, I have blocked an entire Class B IP address range from which the vast majority of the attacks have originated.

The ultimate solution would require upgrading to the current release of Movable Type or going back and unfixing sendmail on the server for the email spam doesn't get sent.

While I was poking around yesterday trying to solve the sendmail / spam issues, I realized that one of the other blogs I host had never had MT-Blacklist installed.  Turns out that part of my server utilization problem was the massive number of comment spams going through a separate instance of MT-Comments for that blog.  Since the primary author of that blog hasn't posted in almost two years, I just disabled MT-Comment as a bandaid.  Unfortunately, there are over 20,000 comment spams, and MT-Blacklist chokes when asked to perform a mass delete on anything much over 25 comments at a time.  It really bugs me to have that many comment spams feeding search engine rankings, but, I'm not willing to spend the time it would take to clear them out 25 at a pop.

SPAMMERS SUCK!

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Posted by David at December 02, 2006 08:15 AM