This is a blog and all blogs with comments enabled are valid targets for "comment spam". So how does one protect their blogs from "comment spam"?
What is comments spam? If you ever heard of Google Bombing, then you already know what comment spam is. But if you don't know, comment spam is when one manually or automatically adds comments to the blog entries with links to their Web sites in an effort to increase the external links to that site and increase the sites PageRank/Popularity in the eyes of the Search Engines.
This webblog is powered by Movable Type, a very popular and free Weblog platform. MovableType has added several patches to reduce the likelihood of this blog getting hit by a comment SPAM bot. The first thing they added was "ThrottleSeconds", this allows the blog administrator to set the number of seconds between comment posts before the individual can post an other comment. So if someone from the same IP address tries posting in 60 seconds after he/she posted again, it will not allow for it. This attempt gets logged in the configuration and you can later ban that IP address from entering your site. The second prevention method they have added was to enforce a redirect link for any comment author URLs. This is to discourage people for posting repeatedly for the sole purpose of increase PageRank. For more information on this, please visit here.
Finally, what I just added last night to this blog was a new blacklist method of spam protection. This is similar to how SpamAssassin combats email spam but for a Weblog. This plugin is called MT-Blacklist and is "a Movable Type plugin to eradicate comment and trackback spam".
This morning it prevented the first attempt: Time: 2004.03.18 07:38:38 IP Address: 208.233.33.11 Information: MT-Blacklist comment denial on Search Engine Roundtable Weblog: (levitra|lolita|phentermine|viagra|vig-?rx|zyban|valtex|xenical|adipex|meridia\b)[\w\-_.]*\.[a-z]{2,}
Shall I ban this IP address? :)
