scum
Have people nothing better to do than to target my poor excuse for a weblog with a massive comment spam attack? It's been going on since last night and I simply fail to understand why I've been hit with over two thousand comments (and counting).
Unfortunately, the one-click MT plugin to delete and blacklist comment spam inexplicably stopped working last week. However, I had an ace up my sleeve: the trusted Teach Yourself PHP, MySQL and Apache in 24 Hours manual that Dr B. the Database Wizard bought me a year ago. A simple well-constructed query and out goes the filth. This is war.Update: I have now received 8,001 spam comments in a little over twelve hours. I have never felt so popular.
Sunday 18 July 2004 at 12:04 am
It's terrible, isn't it. I got over 900 comments from one spammer in a single evening before I spotted it and managed to put a stop to it. I still took the site down for a couple of days while I stripped them out.
You are right: these people are scum. In fact, I think that's actually too kind a word to use for them.
I have since put throttling on my MT install so nobody can post more than one comment every two minutes, which means less will be posted before I catch them, and I have also changed the name of my comments script from comments.cgi, plus made the relevant changes to the files and templates that reference it.
That last move seems to have foxed the automatic spammers and I've not had a single spam entry since.
Good luck.