Note to Deletetheweb.com hostees

A note to hostees – I’ve been out of the loop with the whole digerati nerdsville thing for a while, but it looks like there’s a major global crisis looming about comment spam. Which is to say that the server load from comment spam is getting so large, web hosts (Dreamhost included) are actively looking for ways to combat it. One such method is MT3.x with MT-Blacklist, which I’m running on Quernstone. Alan’s site and John’s site were upgraded with minimal hassle, but that might not be true for more customised sites (Mark, Mija). I don’t think any of us are genuinely causing problems, in that even my fifty junk comments/day is fairly low, but nevertheless I plan to move us all to MT3 over Christmas. Hopefully, to a new revision that’s being talked about by Six Apart.

So: advance warning to have backups to hand, and to make sure I still have a login on your installation. Please check.

Those of you on WordPress, please let me know how the spam load is. If it’s bad, we should consider moving you to MT, though I will investigate anti-spam measures for WordPress. I’m not sure what constitutes ‘bad,’ however. How2 gets about 50/day even though it’s offline, which I suspect is fairly serious for WordPress.

Just a heads-up, anyway. If you have any things you’d like to sort during an upgrade, now would be a good time to tell me about them. For example: Mark, do you want to move to a dedicated domain?

6 thoughts on “Note to Deletetheweb.com hostees”

  1. certainly Blacklist has cut down the spam for me, in fact it has cut out the spam. I was getting 50 to 250 a day now I get zero, none – and you can’t get better than that

  2. Actually John, about one or two a day slip through and get published; I just log in every few days and nuke them for you, and you haven’t noticed. 🙂
    For the record, Blacklist has blocked over 2400 comments at John’s site since we turned it on, on September 20th. My has blocked 5000 or so since September 6th.

  3. Now that I’ve fixed my commenting (whoops!) I’ve been getting spurts of 10 or so, then nothing for a few days, presumably as the spammers change tack and try another angle.
    Overall, after the bad days on Jules site (150 comments in one day), this new system’s fantastic!!

  4. Mark set up a nifty comment spam blocker on our blogs. It forces anyone who wants to post comments to wait for a few seconds before a post is possible. I have had no comment spam since he put it up.

  5. Mija’s a point, with Mark’s blocker it did reduce traffic to 1 or 2 a month. I’m guessing the ones that got thro’ were the die-hard manual ones rather than the auto-comment creators.

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