Incoming!

Christian Crumlish

As Rayne noted to me in email this morning, we were hit with comment spam this morning. The only new thing about this is that it's now hitting on articles I didn't author, so I don't necessarily see the email notification.

We have Jay Allen's MT-Blacklist installed, so all comment notification comes with a link for instant delinking and de-spamming.

When you get comment notification, check to see if it's spam. If you're not sure, we can discuss it. Usually it's easy to tell, although this scandinavian pornographer posts a clever little paragraph that at first glance feels relevant but is really nonsense.

Anyway, when you click the despam link, you're taken to a page where you can delete the message, add any URLs in it to our blacklist, and ban the IP. You can then do a search to see if they posted any other comments, and get those too.

Lately, spammers have included innocent URLs (fda.gov, microsoft.com) in their spam, apparently to see how careful we are being. I don't want to ban those URLs, so I manually remove them from the blacklist before updating it. This is also easy to do in MT-Blacklist.

Sometimes when you do this, someone else may have caught the spam already, in which case MT-Blacklist will give you an error. That's OK.