A Little Maintenance »
It seems when I rebuilt things after the installation of Movable Type 3.1, I didn't do it right. This may have something to do with MT, it may not. In the meantime, I've deleted and rebuilt the entire site. Hopefully the paths should now be correct, so your comments, trackbacks and the like should always go to the correct version of MT for posting on the site. If you actually post a comment or send a trackback, and the contents are reasonable, and don't see it within a couple of hours, please let me know, as perhaps I missed something.
Update: Okay, spam-boy is making me mad. Mostly because he was making me think that I had missed something else, since his comments were coming in from the old install. Fortunately cooler heads prevailed (eventually) and I figured out his scheme. This is probably no surprise to many of you, but it would appear to me that at least one spammer has figured out how to collect links, parse them for posting info (it's not hard), and then submit those links directly to a particular script. In this case mt-comments.cgi. But he or she was posting to the wrong script! So anyway, I finally did what I should have done a month ago and changed the permissions on the old mt-comments.cgi. So my little friend is going to have to do some more trawling to make things work again, at least on this site.
Comments (3)
I finally found this page and took their advice to rename my mt comments script. Since then, I haven't had even a *single* attempt at comment spam. Normally I get 50-100 attempts in a day, most of which are blocked by MT-Blacklist anyway. But it's nice to not see my server taking any of those hits. In addition, I also followed one of their other suggestions, to remove the 'Post' button from the initial screen. This forces people to preview their comments, encouraging higher-quality commenting, but also makes it a bit harder for comment spammers to get through the process.
Posted by Peter | September 23, 2004 10:48 AM
Heh. I like your Amazon wishlist form.
Posted by Phil Ringnalda | September 23, 2004 12:59 PM
Strangely enough, this entry has had a huge amount of spam-related activity. Perhaps it's the sense of humor in those spammers, that I'm talking about them and they want to try to make it through. In any case, since this is the only entry I have that gets hit regularly, I'm going to close comments on this entry. Hopefully that won't matter much to anyone. If you would like to leave a genuine comment, email it to me and I'll post it for you.
Posted by Chad Everett | November 22, 2004 5:58 AM