By Greg Pak
If you create a blog with open comments, you’ll soon discover that scumbags like to post spam in the comment sections of blogs. So what to do? If you’re using MovableType, you can check and ban the IP addresses through which the spammers are accessing the internet. But that’s pretty ineffective, as spammers tend to use a variety of IP addresses. You can use a plug in which creates an image with a code which anyone posting a comment must reproduce in a form field. But spammers have actually started manually filling in those forms — or they’ve cracked the code to automate the process.
The solution?
I’m very happily using MT-Blacklist, through which you can build a blacklist of website addresses which you cull from spam posts. When you hit “De-Spam,” the software automatically deletes any message which contains the blacklisted URLs. And new comments featuring any blacklisted address can’t be posted. This hits the jerks where they hurt — if they can’t post a link, there’s no point in their posting at all.
If you end up using MT-Blacklist, feel free to get started with the blacklist I’ve built for use with this site. I’d recommend using a smaller list like this rather than the giant list you can download through jayallen.org. That list may be pretty comprehensive, but its enormous size seems to bog the software up a bit.
For my email, I’ve started using SpamFire from MatterForm. It’s Mac OS X compatible and is working nicely so far.