jcguy 0 Report post Posted June 22, 2005 Hi all, I'm having a huge challenge combating those comment and referral spammers. I operate a blog on my website, it's powered by Movable Type. I've always faced the problem of comment spammers which their automated bots spamming my comments script. It's seriously wasting my space and my bandwidth. Already my mail has been flooded with those useless comments notifications and it took up some 80 mb!I looked around in the mail folder and decided not to touch anything, in case it screwed up. Is there anyway to reduce the amount of space taken up by the mail folder?I once solved the problem using .htaccess to give those bots a Forbbiden page when the comment form input contains keywords such as porn, casino and so on. However it seemed to have caused a server error problem since the admin reset the servers so I had no choice but to remove the commands.I followed what other websites are saying about using .htaccess to fight comment spam, it seems to work a bit but there's this particular spammer which cannot be caught by my .htaccess.I need advice, how so I use back the previous method of giving those bots a Forbbiden page when the comment form input contains the keywords, without causing a internal server error? What should I write in my .htaccess?Thanks for any help in advance! I'm really angry at those spammers Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Houdini 0 Report post Posted June 22, 2005 OK Hope you enjoy it and have no problems.Can you set up your site to require a login or other security measure for comments? If so can you also assign that theynot only enter a username but a security code that a bot can't read?Just wondering! Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
infamousflame 0 Report post Posted June 22, 2005 Why don't you ask commenters to email you before they comment? That way you can turn commenting off until just before they comment. This would hopefully, hopefully mind you, stop a lot of these spammer bots. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
chiiyo 0 Report post Posted June 23, 2005 (edited) Went google-digging for you and found a few pertinent posts on the movabletype weblog regarding comment spam, as well as stumbled upon this Guide to combating comment spam article on the sixapart website. I think it's worth taking a look. Besides that one, I found some other entries regarding comment spam, one from last year recommending you use Dynamic templates in order to combat the additional server load, and another more recent that talks about using the No follow tag that prevents comments from getting high ratings on search engines, which is one of the reasons for comment spamming (so this kind of solves the problem at the root, per se).All three are worth looking into if you're really that affected. Good luck! Edited June 23, 2005 by microscopic^earthling (see edit history) Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
