BlogSPAMmed — 12 Oct 2003

Macinblog's comments have been heavily spammed these last 7 days. I've spent the last 2 hours cleaning up the unwanted comments and blocking their IPs out.

The comment's always come with a phony yahoo.com e-mail address, and an URL pointing to some porn site :( Most of the time, the comment simply reads "Interesting" or "Interesting, my previous post got lost" or something similar.

The URL always points to some pornographic site. I've run a lookup and alerted the ISPs I could trace of the nature of some of their "clients". Unfortunately, it won't do much good.

This raises a problem regarding the open comments of weblog posts. MovableType doesn't currently offer the possibility of turning on or off the URL field. If the user enters an e-mail and an URL then, MT builds a link with the URL. Which is what it is meant to do, and is beneficial to the user's site as it adds a link pointing towards it. Typically, Google takes into account that parameter in its search results.

But the side effect can be nasty. I guess there are robots filling up MT comment fields with useless comments and links back to somber sites as those I cleaned up tonight.

I might consider removing the URL field altogether from the comment form.