Comment spam bombed
Ben, Mena, Anil and company–please do something to stop/slow comment spam on TypePad. I have gotten dozens (currently 50 60 70 100 110 120 139) of spam comments today. All from different IP’s. All containing god-awful porno URLs. I know Matt from PVR blog has had some of the same spams, so a TypePad-wide filter would really help. We can’t install MT plug-ins, so there’s nothing I can do without your help.
In the span it took to write this, I have gotten 4 more spam comments… It’s like carpet bombing. Is there a way I can close comments on all past entries without having to manually go back and do it? That would help. Maybe it should be added along with a “close comments after X days” button.
Update: Here’s a post by Ben saying that they’re working to make comment-life easy. Thanks!
I’ve seen some very subtle comment spams where the text was pretty innocuous but the URL points to some porno, viagra, or casino site. I had to delete a newly registered user at macmegasite today because his home page was a porno site (I assume that was a variety of spam, since it was a clickable link for latest user)
They added in comment spam throttling, so you can’t get totally innundated. Judging by this morning’s attack, it looks like if you submit five spams in the span of one minute you get banned.
They say they’re working on better comment management, to make it easier to delete a swath of comments. Currently I just keep reloading my blog’s admin page and going through the “last five comments” list one at a time to remove them.
My email checks by itself every minute, and I was getting between 4 and 6 spams every time it downloaded new mail.
How new is the throttling? How will it deal with different IPs? Seems like they could safely bring that up to say, 1 comment per minute or so.
Thanks for the update. Tonight’s spam seems to have stopped, but I must say I cannot deal with 140 a night!
(BTW, I did the same thing with going down the last five list. Just got annoying after a while.)
Very interesting, when one suggested on another nanopublishing site that image verification would eventually be needed to stem spam comments, you tried to question the veracity of my statements, now, in a solipsistic hypocritical fashion, you complain about not being able to throttle comments that are spam.
You are of questionable character sir.
Image verification is not a very good solution, for a variety of reasons. That doesn’t mean he likes comment spam.
Betty:
Note that I didn’t even remotely ask for image verification. If given the option, I would not enable it. There are other ways to cut down spam, without having to at best annoy readers, and at worst prevent them from commenting.
The new MT solution is it just won’t let someone comment more than once in an X amount of time (which you can change). I guarantee that’ll show up on Typepad if it hasn’t already. It doesn’t do much to stop spam but it makes it alot less annoying.
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