I installed MT-Blacklist on my Moveable Type system (the software that generates this blog) about a month ago. It's a plugin that checks new comments for hyperlinks that match undesirable patterns. If a hyperlink matches one of the patterns, the comment is refused. Not only that, when I get email that a comment has made it past the gates of MT-Blacklist, it provides a link which, if the comment looks like yet more new sneaky stinky spam, I can click to bring up a window that allows me to delete the comment, rebuild the affected pages, and add the links from the comment to the blacklist. To make it perform this action, I click a button labelled "Go forth now and do my bidding." After it's done doing my bidding it has a further link that will search all my comments for ones containing the newly added patterns. One more click and those are all gone too. That's four clicks to obliterate an entire comment spam attack. To deal with these without MT-Blacklist would take at least twice as many clicks for each individual comment.
Since I installed it less than 30 days ago, it has blocked over 1,300 spam comments.
Now if you'll excuse me, I need to go send some money to Jay Allen, the guy who not only wrote this brilliant countermeasure, but who gives it away to anyone who wants it, free.
Posted by jeffy at November 21, 2004 08:50 PMI've had Blacklist installed for a while but I didn't understand it as well until you helped me - thanks!
Posted by: Julie at November 23, 2004 09:14 AM