The fight goes on. Spammers keep trying to thrust their links to pharmaceutical and gambling and whatever crap.com sites via the Maricopa Learning eXchange comments. Today, some hours were spent making sure all new comments were not made visible, so after submitting the form, they should see that nothing has been added.
Don’t you think a spammer would get a clue they are wasting their time? Nahh, that assumes some level of intelligence.
Their spam is going right into the can!
I have things in place to ensure the submissions are coming from our form and not spawned by a script.
They latest tool is an email notification that will go to the MLX package owner, and allow them a one click option to trash a comment or make it visible. It should be running tomorrow.
It sure woudl be nice to develop some new resources than waste time with the roaches.
Crunch! There goes another phenedrine pusher!
Alan, I am bloglining you blog for some time now (it¬€s one of my daily reads) and I am following your journey against the roaches in comments and on wikis with some kind of tension. Have you ever thought of implementing captchas (http://www.captcha.net/) for every comment and every editing in your wiki? I think this would be a way for dividing human-beings from spam-robots (if the spam is not done manually)…
Hi Marco,
Thanks for stepping up to the comment podium.
I looked a bit at captcha’s and have not tossed them out completely. I have implemented some encrypted keys and checks to make sure the comment input is coming from our forms and not script generated; this is done behind the scenes.
From what I can see in terms of when these things ar eposted and what they are, it soure likes like one stinkin’ spam roach (and pfffff to you if you are reading this you scum of the earth) who keeps pasting the stoopid links in our site.
But spammers are like, really dumb! Totally! Like if you were trying to spam us, and you submitted your 50 links to gambling-poker.com and cheap-v*agra.com and beastiality-fotos.org and they never appeared on our site, would you keep trying? Are you that low on the IQ scale? Well?
Listen up spammer (that’s not you, Marco)– all comments are going into the holding tank, and we are shooting them down before they enter our site.
However, wikis are a bit harder to mess with- you have to get deeper in the code. Right now, i amworking on a schme of banning by IP the entire south asian continent. I apologize to the good intentioned souls there, but you really ought to rally and clamp down on all the spammers who live there and are giving y’all a bad name (I am kidding about IP banning Asia, I could not do that if I tried).
One thing I’ve done on my family blog is to automatically post any comment that doesn’t have links. If there is even one link, I have to approve it. That way most of my posters get the immediate satisfaction of seeing there comment in print. Because it’s my family site no one ever puts in a URL. But even if they did I can approve them pretty quickly. Spam always has a URL, so it always gets caught. So spam only wastes my time, it doesn’t offend my family with nasty links.
That’s an intersting idea, Ben… are you doing this now in MovableType??
I can wrap that into the MLX comments. Right now, all new comments are set with a visibllity tag of 0 meaning they are not displayed, and I am sending an email with a link that will either toggle them visible or trash them. I could perhaps make it so comments w/o HTML are initially visible.
I am also setting up a blacklists based on IPs of identified spammers.
Hey SPAMMERS! Are you readin’ this? Your stuff is going right to the dung pile!!!!
I’m using WordPress, which comes with the option to set a number of links that can be in a comment before it has to be approved. Most spam seems to come with at least 4 links, so I could may loosen the control a little.