I should really stop doing this
Published December 12th, 2004 in GeneralThe change should have been completely transparent and invisible to you, so here’s the info: I’m running Wordpress now.
So that’s the fourth time I’ve switched blog CMS this year. Movable Type → Wordpress → Textpattern → MT again → Wordpress.
The main reason for switching is that the comment spam problem for Movable Type has become completely unbearable. It can quite literally kill a server. MT-Blacklist helps, but has a flaw that allows some comment spam to pass right through it.
And then there’s the whole “rebuild on every comment” aspect. If MT gets hit with 50 spams in 10 seconds, that’s 50 mt-comments.cgi processes that are all rebuilding a page. Sometimes the same page.
The TextDrive servers can easily push 20,000,000 hits per day. Yet mt-comments.cgi can effectively push the server load up into the 300s. This data speaks for itself — 94% of the hits are to mt-comments.cgi. 3-400 of them are proper comments, the rest is spam.
Wordpress and Textdrive are dynamic. There’s no page to generate every time a comment hits.
I still get spam, though. Spammers monitor web services like Weblogs.com and go spam them as soon as they see an updated blog there. I get some spam every time I write a new entry.
Enter Spam Karma. So far it’s stopped spam dead in its tracks, and this far more CPU efficient than MT-Blacklist. It works great, and the focus is to require as little interaction as possible from the blog owner.
In closing, Wordpress has matured immensely since I last tried it. This will be my weapon of choice for quite some time now.
8 Comments to “I should really stop doing this”
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My response: Nobody from 64.x.x.x, 65.x.x.x, 66.x.x.x, 67.x.x.x, 68.x.x.x and 69.x.x.x can access any of my .cgi-files. 90% of the spam came from those IPs, so it was a simple matter with a .htaccess file. That way the people from these IPs can read my blog just like normal people should, but not write any comments or do trackbacks.
SPAMINATOR is an awesome solution and is lean and mean.
We’ve tried spaminator too on our blog. It seemed to be doing a good job the first few days but after that its efficiency ratio dropped to 10%.
Spamkarma on the other hand has been gods gift so far.. not a single spam message has gone through (holds wood)!
Welcome home!
Craig, Spam Karma integrates MooKitty’s checks and many many others, so it is that much better at identifying spam. Plus, it has automated CAPTCHA or e-mail self-approval for questionable comments, and it will mail you digests of deleted comments, just in case.
Not trying to talk you back (everything I’ve read about WP has been really good), but I’ve been having good luck with MT3′s dynamic publishing. MTBlacklist catches most of the spam, but even when I do start to get hit hard with something that gets through, I at least don’t have to worry about the page rebuilds (especially since for me, at least, they never seem to hit new entries, just old ones that aren’t accessed much anymore). If you ever have reason to look at MT again, poke around with the dynamic options.
Hey there!
Thanks a lot for the praise…
Only one little thing: if it’s not too much trouble for you, it would be awesome if, instead of the outdated introductory post, you could link to the newer main Spam Karma repository directly (it contains important updates and the latest reports from our technicians down in the Spam Containment Research Lab):
http://unknowngenius.com/blog/wordpress/spam-karma/
Thanks again and good luck with the Spam Fighting!
I am setting up another wp blog and did have concerns about potential comment spamming; drive me nuts! Thanks for the experience, will diffently give Spam Karma a shot.
I don’t know how long this technique will work, but I changed the name of wp-comments.php and change the form action in wp-comments-post.php to point to the new script name. I was getting quite a bit of spam a while back and that stopped it cold.