Comment Spam

Published on 5 February 2008 in , , , ,

I confess to being mildly concerned when I logged into Movable Type just now and found a great big whopping piece of comment spam had somehow managed to get itself onto an article yesterday.

Goodness knows how because I pre-moderate all comments that appear on this site in order to prevent spam getting onto my pages. Comments never go live without

I presume I managed to press a wrong button and managed to approve the spam rather than delete it – I’ll never know because I actually deleted by Activity Log in a spate of housekeeping. I’d rather think that then that someone’s found a backdoor into MT!

What would make the world a better place though is if Movable Type’s comment script was, well, just better! It seems woefully simplistic with no options for enforcing email addresses, or doing some simple filtering like “It seems to me like you’ve put 50000 URLs in your comment – did you mean to or are you just an idiot?”

I did try to get SpamFirewall working but found it didn’t like me. This sounds like a great script as it checks comments against a “Top 40” list of common spam techniques before submitting them to the comment script. Unfortunately I’ve had no joy getting it working – rather than pass comments through, I just get a 404.

But with comment spam being a rife and regular problem, surely that’s exactly the kind of thing that should be built in from the beginning?