Server outages due to comment spammers

Hey everybody, sorry for the outages the past couple days.

I’ve been busy with law school finals, and comment spammers have been mounting massive attacks on your blogs (as you probably already know.)

For the moment (4PM on Saturday, Dec 11th) I have disabled commenting so I can :
#1 delete as many spam comments as I can find [they may still show up until you rebuild your blog]
#2 find the best solution for preventing these attacks [mt-blacklist doesn’t seem to be able to keep up with so many spam attacks]

If anyone has suggestions, please feel free to post them on this thread.*

*We need a solution that will work for everyone, without everybody having to make a bunch of changes to their templates etc.

Respectfully,
-JD

20 comments

  3. J.D.:

    Would this work?

    Regarding spammers…change the default name of your mt-comments.cgi file to something else (penguins_talk.cgi or something like that). This way, spammers won’t be able to spam your comments but real humans will stil be able to leave comments.

  4. I like your idea about changing the mt-comment.cgi filename, intially I thought it would be a problem because we’d have to update all the blogs… but that shouldn’t be too tough via some simple SQL.

    For the time being though, I blocked the useragent header for one of the main spam bot programs and that seems to have helped. I’m also working on keeping MT blacklist more up to date with the latest spammer info.

    As for WordPress, it is taking 1&1 about three-four weeks to come up with our server (which is a total bummer.) I’m considering just buying another server and some more rackspace where I colocate.

    So the good news is that we’ll be getting a server (one way or another) that is about 5 to 6 times faster than out current server (CPU wise.) The bad news is that it may take until January.

  5. I reckon once we move to wordpress, much of the comment spam would be solved. MT-Blacklist doesn’t seem to be working lately. I did few IP search, text/regex search from the recent spams and MT-blacklist couldn’t find them.

  6. Mine still has hundreds of spam posts on it. Are you going around and cleaning them out for us? There isn’t a group delete for comments or I’d just do it myself…

  8. Hey Kinslayer and Hpnadig thanks for the heads up, I’ve gone through and updated the blacklist plus manually removing spam.

    Also, there is an odd comment spammer targeting weblogs.us It isn’t the usual spam looking for backlinks, this person is just maliciously spamming. The URLs and emails are fake, I guess they must just be trying to hammer our servers. Thankfully the messages are easy to delete, it’s just that the blacklist can’t catch them.

    Soon I’ll be back from vacation and we’ll get some better preventive measure in place (plus move to the faster server!) ETA end of Jan.

    Best wishes and sorry for the troubles,
    -JD

  10. clonazepam
    clonazepam
    clonazepam
    clonazepam
    clonazepam
    clonazepam
    clonazepam
    clonazepam
    clonazepam
    clonazepam
    clonazepam
    clonazepam
    clonazepam
    clonazepam
    clonazepam
    clonazepam
    clonazepam
    clonazepam

  15. toyota corolla
    toyota corolla
    toyota corolla
    toyota corolla
    toyota corolla
    toyota corolla
    toyota corolla
    toyota corolla
    toyota corolla
    toyota corolla
    toyota corolla
    toyota corolla

  17. support stocking
    support stocking
    support stocking
    support stocking
    support stocking
    support stocking
    support stocking
    support stocking
    support stocking
    support stocking
    support stocking
    support stocking

  18. FFXI Gil, FFXI Gil Currency, Cheap FFXI Gil and FFXI Gil Final Fantasy XI Forums and Chat. World of Warcraft Gold – Buy World of Warcraft Gold, Cheapest World of Warcraft Gold Online – WOW Gold Items and Info. World of Warcraft gold forums. http://www.mmodaily.com/ FFXI Gil | World of Warcraft Gold

Comments are closed.