Right, that’s it.

The last few days we’ve been flooded with a whole raft of comment spam. Nothing really new there, but this particular variant is both ubiquitous and unblockable. For some reason, the spam blocking software on TTM does not recognise the URL’s in the comments, so it cannot block them either.

Time to pull out my leet Perl hackerish skills and do something about it, I say. Over the next few hours (or days), comments on this blog might behave a bit … erratically … while I work behind the scenes to change some things. I’ll update this entry when the work is done.

For those interested, I’m going to replace the comment script with a differently named one. As most of the spam comments are the result from an automated posted to the well known comment script of Movable Type, that should take care of most spam. I hope. Of course, I might well destroy the setup completely :)

Update: well, that was surprisingly easy. No leet hackerish skills necessary whatsoever. If anybody finds anything wrong with comments, please let me know. Now let’s hope the comment spammers rely on the default name of the comment script and won’t parse the content of this blog to find the new name.

Update 2: Well, it seems to be working, to say the least. Since I changed the name of the comment script, the spam filter did not have to block a single comment, and the webserver access logs show lots of scripts butting their heads against the missing mt-comments.cgi . So Robartes 1 - Spammers 0 so far.