Too Cool for Internet Explorer

Sunday, February 6, 2005

Comment Spam On the Rise

Surely I’m not the only one who’s noticed a definite rise in comment spamming frequency. Readers, please know in advance that I absolutely do plan to eventually upgrade to Movable Type 3 and enable TypeKey registration. If you do not currently have a TypeKey account, do yourself a favor and sign up. It costs nothing and will undoubtedly soon be the only way to leave comments on virtually any blog.

In the mean time, I am fairly sure I could cut out a lot of the comment spam I get by simply blocking a single word from being allowed to be part of a URL. I’m not going to type the word here for fear of attracting spammers, but the word is a place people waste lots of money in Sin City. It also starts with the letter C and ends with the letter O.

Frankly, I’m not sure why this word isn’t already part of MT-Blacklist’s corpus. I guess it would be considered a bit too extreme, but I would have no problem with it.

So, a little help, please. I’ve never really been able to understand how the expressions for MT-Blacklist work. What do I need to add to block any comment that has the aforementioned word in a URL? Does MT-Blacklist ban based on any word within the comment, or only if it’s hyperlinked? Is it easy to have one expression take care of both the singular and plural (just an S on the end) form of the word, or do I need two expressions?

» Posted by ALBj at 06:00 PM (ET)
Category: Housekeeping

Comments

Sorry, due to comment spam abuse, new comments on this entry are closed until I find time to upgrade Movable Type and enable registration and moderation.