February 04, 2004

Comment Spam

So, today, I got hit with my first major comment spammer. Previously, I had had one other person who posted non-sensical comments and a link to a few articles, but this one was full-bore, automated postings to every single article. The text was exactly the same and was an advertisement for something or other.

Luckily, MovableType has IP address banning, so I was able to block them in the middle of their posting. But not before 120 comments had been posted. Had to write some SQL to delete them from the database and then rebuild the whole site.

Yeesh. I guess this is a coming-of-age ritual for Just-in-casionally. Hopefully it's not the start of an annoying trend.

Posted by richard at February 4, 2004 12:11 AM
Comments

We're under continuous attack on a blog that I run at www.deliberative-democracy.net. Ultimately, I hope that a human challenge system like spamarrest will be publicly available because I don't think this problem is going to go away on its own.

But congratulations on being recognized by the spambots as spamworthy!

- Mike

Posted by: Michael Weiksner at February 4, 2004 11:05 AM

The above comment was brought to you by spamarrest, http://www.deliberative-democracy.net, and the National Association for Shrewd Product Placements.

Posted by: Brad A. at February 4, 2004 11:42 AM