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Update: MT-Blacklist v 1.5 is out and includes several new features in the fight against comment spam. We've installed it and have since stopped three spam attempts. THANKS, Jay Allen

http://www.jayallen.org

We were hit yesterday by a 3-hour long automated attack of our comment system. Starting at 1:30 PM and lasting until 4:30 PM, the spammers placed over 300 innocent looking comments with URLs to p0rn sites. We were able to stop it mid-attack by updating the comment blacklist.

Once again, thanks goes to Jay Allen for MT-Blacklist.cgi.

Apparently, we weren't the only blog hit by this attack. Another comment on Jay's website indicated a similar attack of over 200 comments.

For those of you wondering why p0rn sites would use this tactic, all you have to do is look at Google's page rank technology. Inbound links increase popularity and consequently, page rank in the Google search results. So, if they can create inbound links themselves from unsuspecting, ligitimate blogs (using the comment system) they can essentially head fake Google into thinking the particular p0rn site has some real popularity.

Commet spam is a moving target, however. Once you ban comments from one URL, they just change URLs and enter another comment. The trick is to keep the ban list up-to-date through the blog community. This is exactly what Jay Allen has done. So far, our ban list has 691 blacklisted sites and growing thanks to Jay and the other bloggers involved in keeping the list alive and well.

Anti-comment spam tactics are improving. The latest version of Movable Type includes URL re-directs in links included in comments. This essentially makes the whole theory of comment spam (Google Page Rank through inbound links) obsolete. By re-directing URL's, the target site is masked from Google therefore creating an "impotent" link and delivering no Page Rank advantage.

Many bloggers have also instituted interesting terms of use policies on comments. Essentially, it says that if you use the comment system for linking to a commercial site, you owe a fee to the site owner.

Finally, we've installed a comment throttle. For the occasional commenter, this means nothing, but to combat "crap flooders" we're only allowing a certain number of comments over a designated period of time.

Most of this will be transparent to legit commenters, but our blacklist could in fact catch some "bad" keywords in your comments and deny the post. If that happens, please try again with a different word or phrase when posting your legitimate comments.

Great site guys... Keep up the good work :)

Goggle Gropups might be usefull for it.
http://groups.google.com/
...............
Bo Evanson
(whthinde)

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