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September 29, 2003
Comment Cruft
I've been slightly annoyed recently by the minor outbreak of inane comments posted by the intellectually inept who wind their way to some years old post via a search engine. Comments of this nature tend to be more annoying than offensive, and sometimes are just pathetic in their lack of basic reading comprehension.
But more disconcerting is the recent outbreak of comment spam. In the last week, I've deleted at least a half dozen or more advertisements for penis enlargement pills, viagra, and other questionable products that were posted to comments on random blog entries. Seems like I'm not alone either [1, 2, 3, 4, etc.].
I've seen a few methods [1, 2] for stopping this that involve multiple customizations to Movable Type.
For the time being, though, I've finally converted the backend of my Movable Type installation to MySQL* and used this close comments script (which you actually have to get here now) to close comments on all posts older than 21 days. Not only does this decrease the annoying crufty responses, but I hope that it will also limit some of the targets for the vulgar spam.
I'm seriously considering changing my policy of having open comments on every new post. I might just open up comments for the posts that I want people's feedback on. That seems a shame, but I spend enough time filtering spam from my email inboxes. I don't want to have to do the same with my weblog.
* That also explains why the Last Modified date for every post on this weblog is now 5:53pm yesterday. Argh.
Posted September 29, 2003 08:06 PM
Comments
This is a helpful rundown, Greg. I hope you won't feel the need to greatly restrict commenting (also hope I won't feel that need eventually). Though I don't like to get into "what is a weblog" fundamentalism, I do think that commenting is one of the primary features that makes blogs such a great medium.
Comments by Frederick Emrich . Posted September 29, 2003 08:26 PM
I think an minor configuration change to Apache might help as well. I understand the concept, just not the implementation currently, but when I do, I'll email you the details. I'm not much of a llama wrangler (I'm only slightly more proficient in Perl than Pascal), but a similar change could be done to the cgi script itself.
Simply put, Comments are the output of calling a cgi script, which can be automated quite easily (for the spammer). All they need is an auto discovery script, which they could cobble together from the MT sources.
Comments by anthony . Posted September 30, 2003 12:05 PM
Testing if this is closed
Comments by Biff . Posted November 18, 2003 02:12 PM
Greg,
I think you need to make this a cron to continually close old comments from cruft (I am testing now at CDB)
Comments by Alan Levine . Posted November 18, 2003 02:13 PM