aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South

Friday, June 30, 2006

Fighting blog comment spam

FINAL UPDATE: Comments are back, the spam is deleted and I will be implementing a new spam prevention plug-in in the next few days. ICDSoft has been absolutely super helpful in working with me to resolve this problem. They truly are the ultimate in web hosting! I’ve still got some real work to do, but they got me through the worst of it.

UPDATE: Still no resolution. My ISP isn’t giving me the resources to delete the comments (I can do it one by one - for hundreds of them). They have shut down all comments to help me out; I am trying to find a way to run the plug in on old posts and get comments open again on new posts. This problem only recently overwhelmed the Movable Type spam filter…

I’m not so happy about Movable Type right now, though it is as much my fault as anything else. The improved Movable Type spam filter had been working ok up until about a week ago. now I’m hit with hundreds of spam comments a day. When I try to declare them “Junk” I get a server 500 error.

Asking my hosting service, ICDSoft, about it, they tell me I’m hitting my memory limit, that they’ve already raised it for me and can’t raise it any higher, and that Movable Type makes unreasonable demands on the server so I should consider WordPress.

Yes, I know about WordPress. And the work it takes to change. In any event I’ve got to get rid of that spam and close down comments on those old messages. That will take a good long time; that’s what I’ll be doing much of today.

Argh!