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« Advice to Artsies | Main | "My Architect" and Louis Kahn »

December 11, 2003

 Spammed, or Something

A plea for help or advice.

All kind of ads are showing up in 2Blowhards' Comments section. Viagra, of course, but oh so much more too -- easy credit, drugs you've never heard of, even budget travel deals. Some of them are quite short, but others are enormously long and include dozens of URLs. I've had to spend hours combing through our entries and comments, and deleting whatever spam-comments I could find.

It's terrifying that the scumbags have branched out from email spam and have figured out how to attack the Comments sections of innocent blogs. How long until these monsters bring the entire web to its knees?

But, my own hysteria aside: does anyone have any advice about how we might best deal with, and maybe even put an end to, this plague? We'd be grateful for any and all suggestions.

posted by Michael at December 11, 2003




Comments

I'm not sure you'll find the answer you need here, but at least the commiseration should be comforting. I couldn't find a permalink, so scroll down to the November 6 - October 13 entries:

http://chujoe.net/archives/cat_machine_dreams.html

Posted by: Dente on December 11, 2003 5:26 PM

Moveable Type is aware of the problem, and I'd advise you go here:

http://www.movabletype.org/news/2003_10.shtml#000870

There's an MT plugin you can install (or get your techy people to install) which is pretty good.

Posted by: Felix on December 11, 2003 6:58 PM

We need better human beings - somebody's buying the stuff, spamming is not a hobby...

Posted by: Misanthropyst on December 11, 2003 7:48 PM

The little thingy that many blogs use that requires you to enter a number from a graphic to post is good.

It's available here: http://james.seng.cc/archives/000145.html

But its not easy to install.

Posted by: David Mercer on December 11, 2003 11:37 PM

One way you can cut down on spam without having to install plug-ins is to go into your Movable Type settings and ban the spammers' IP addresses. I don't know how foolproof it is, but it may be of note that I've only had one piece of spam at my blog since I started blocking IPs (and only two in total). If you like I can send you a list of the ones I've blocked so you don't get harrassed by them.

That said, an additional plug-in may also be worthwhile. My blog host installed one after one of my fellow tenants started getting blasted by the spambastards, although it has the unpleasant side-effect of slowing down the comments function, so that when you hit the "post" button it may take anywhere up to two minutes for the comment to actually properly go through.

Posted by: James Russell on December 11, 2003 11:58 PM

Many thanks. And forgive a real Dummies question: it seems like I have to get the IP number for the spammers, right? How do I derive that when all I've got to work with is the URL and email address of the spammer? Is the IP number buried in there somewhere?

Appreciate the help.

Posted by: Michael Blowhard on December 12, 2003 1:07 PM

Get MT-Blacklist, have your tech person install it (it's actually not very hard, but requires that certain programs be on the server), and you can eliminate any number of spams with the click of a button--those few, that is, that get past the blacklist. Since installing it last month, I have been comment spammed only once, and it only took me about a minute to deal with it.

Highly recommended.

http://www.jayallen.org/comment_spam/2003/12/mtblacklist_v162

Posted by: Dave Trowbridge on December 12, 2003 2:45 PM

Michael -- If you get email notification of when someone comments at your site, the IP address is mentioned in the email. Otherwise, what you need to do is this:

1) go into Movable Type and find the bespammed entry
2) scroll down to where it says "edit comments"
3) click on the name of the spamment author
4) the IP address is there. Make a note of it before deleting the spamment.

Once you have the spammer's IP address, do this:

1) go into Movable Type
2) click on the Weblog Config button
3) click on the IP Banning link
4) enter the IP address and hit the Add button.

These are the spammer IPs I've collected so far if you want some to start off with:

212.179.188.132
66.82.48.1
80.14.97.44
217.128.19.42
66.169.84.86
81.152.241.34
64.12.96.238
65.77.116.28
61.181.5.70
24.101.161.185
210.220.73.7
200.160.248.250
209.210.176.20
80.50.117.113
209.210.176.21
80.58.11.45
144.132.43.114
62.213.67.122
80.229.13.81

Posted by: James Russell on December 14, 2003 1:40 AM

Many thanks to all -- helpful hints even I can understand and make use of. Much appreciated.

Posted by: Michael Blowhard on December 15, 2003 10:59 PM

This is a nice blog.

Posted by: FREE PORN on May 29, 2004 7:19 PM


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