Attack of the Spambots!
We're back! A month of forced sabbatical was brought on by blog comment spammers who, in their attempt to boost the Google rank of their particular site hawking pharmaceuticals, p0rn, casinos, etc., hijacked our comments. We here at Ish: Tech Central have been taking various anti-spam measures to try and keep them at bay. But our best defense, MT Blacklist, turned out to be our undoing. Blacklist checks every link in a comment against a list of known spammers. In theory, it works fine, and as more spammers attempt to comment, the longer the list grows. But as the list grows, it takes more and more processing power to check every link against it. When it's one person commenting, that just means a long wait. But when spambots attack with hundreds of comments at once, it's a huge drain on the host's server. Trip has the skinny on what happened. Basically, our host Wowrack decided to pull the plug on Triptronix.net because we were taking down their server. The medicine cured the disease but killed the patient.
So, props to Trip -- make that mad props -- for overseeing our move to a new host, Fluid Hosting, and re-installing Movable Type. As for the comment spam, we've installed a CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart), provided by James Seng. Everytime you leave a comment, you'll have to enter an ever-changing security code. I've been resisting this change since, if you can't read the code on your screen, you're shut out of commenting. But it seems to be the only method thus far that's bot-proof. Faced with the choice of accessiblity and functionality, I'm going with functionality. You can't say we didn't try! If anyone wants to leave a comment but can't, email me at ishbadiddle -at- triptronix.net and I'll post it for you.
I've been tweaking the code to try and restore all the bells and whistles, but do let me know if there's something that's not working any more.
| Movable Type | Accessibility | Triptronix | CAPTCHA |
Isn't there serious ground for a law suit here? Regular spam is a nuisance but little more. In this case, Ish was effectively vandalized, and the attempt to revive the Blog cost time if not a lot of money: I don't know if Trip charged anything, but no doubt what he did is worth a lot of $$ on the market. And surely Ish isn't the only site to suffer from this problem.
Comment #1 :: link :: March 15, 2005 11:42 AMIsn't there serious ground for a law suit here? Regular spam is a nuisance but little more. In this case, Ish was effectively vandalized, and the attempt to revive the Blog cost time if not a lot of money: I don't know if Trip charged anything, but no doubt what he did is worth a lot of $$ on the market. And surely Ish isn't the only site to suffer from this problem.
Comment #2 :: link :: March 15, 2005 11:48 AMAs one of the resident attorneys of Ish (hey guys, where is my retainer check?), let me assure you that legal action is not an option.
Putting aside the whole "who are you going to sue and how exactly do you intend to find them" issue, it isn't clear what they did was wrong:
You offered a comments section.
They took advantage of that and posted comments.
Your 'spam protection' program that you installed cause your own site to fail.
Not their problem.
And, of course, not the fault of any one particular comment - how do you say "that particular comment caused the site to fail?"
Oh, and who are you going to sue and how exactly do you intend to find them?
ME-L, for this legal advice (which I don't stand behind), please double my normal retainer. Thank you.
Comment #3 :: link :: March 15, 2005 02:01 PMI've been tweaking the code to try and restore all the bells and whistles, but do let me know if there's something that's not working any more.
Actually, one of my bells is no longer working, and I'm hoping you'll get a chance to get to that soon.
Comment #4 :: link :: March 15, 2005 02:07 PMWelcome back. Even on my meager site eradicating spam (for me, TrackBack Ping spam) takes way too much time, even with MT-Blacklist.
Texas Hold-Em is rapidly becoming a curse-phrase. Sad, because I so like to play....
Comment #5 :: link :: March 15, 2005 03:41 PMI don't pontificate on the subject of spam, since, as Pa Simpson says, it angries up the blood. So I'll just say, Hallelujah, you're back, hope it lasts!
Comment #6 :: link :: March 15, 2005 05:16 PMI don't pontificate on the subject of spam, since, as Pa Simpson says, it angries up the blood. So I'll just say, Hallelujah, you're back, hope it lasts!
Comment #7 :: link :: March 15, 2005 05:19 PMWelcome back!
The Spam Karma plugin for WordPress has an interesting Captcha option to send a verification e-mail. This seems to get around the limitations that you note for the visually impaired. If you can't see the Captcha screen, you can verify by e-mail. I don't know if there is anything similar for MT.
Comment #8 :: link :: March 15, 2005 07:49 PM
