New Message: Comment Spam Problems

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A new message was posted:

Address: http://manila.userland.com/discuss/msgReader$650

By: Rogers Cadenhead (rcade at yahoo.com)

I am getting hammered by comment spam on the RSS Advisory Board site, which runs on Harvard's Manila server. I have cobbled together a makeshift solution for the same problem on a Movable Type site [1], and I think the solution could work for Manila also: Give users the ability to automatically close old weblog entries to comments after a specified number of days.

On a popular Movable Type site, I've shut off comments after a week and almost all of my comment spam problems are gone. Spammers find my entries through search engines, and they don't hit new entries because they aren't in the engines yet.

Another feature that would be a nice deterrent is a setting that rejects a comment that contains X or more number of links in it. I do that with four or more links on my own software for Workbench, and it has caused hundreds of spam comments to be rejected upon receipt with no intervention on my part. Very few, if any, legitimate users put four or more links in a comment.

[1] http://www.cadenhead.org/workbench/entry/2004/11/30#2389

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