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This Is No Modern Romance, Spam Edition
Hi. Could it be? Almost two weeks without a post?
I apologize for being away for so long. As I mentioned the other day in a comment, our trip was a bit more adventurous than we'd planned or expected and it's taken a bit more time than I thought to get back into the usual ebb and flow around here. Long story short, our car broke down on the way home from Michigan and we rashly decided just to buy a new one rather than fix it. So L. and I are now the ambivalent owners of a brand spanking new, 2005, “sunburst orange metallic” Chevy Cobalt sedan. She likes it because it's orange. I like it because it has cruise control. Yay! We spent nearly 8 solid hours trying to get the stupid thing inspected and registered today. Not yay.
But there will be time for more about that later, especially over at ambivalent images where you will soon find plenty of pictures, I hope. For now, part of the catching up comes from the fact that I was greeted upon my return with a big steaming pile off spam spam spam! Apparently, this and other sites on our shared server have been getting attacked w/so much spam it's been shutting the server down. This led to intermittent disabling of comments, and that might happen again. It also means the server seems glacially slow (at least from my end). And worst of all, Blawg Wisdom appears to be hosed in a completely mystifying way.
So, I apologize for all of that, and I hope to have everything back to normal ASAP. If anyone has any ideas for good spam control on MT (yeah, right) or if you understand what that stupid “parse error” is when you load up the Blawg Wisdom home page, please let me know. As far as spam control goes, we've checked out the spam guide and we're already using MT-Blacklist, MT-DSBL, and we've turned off commenting on some older entries. The next step may be a captcha, but I'm certainly open to suggestions.
Posted July 16, 2005 04:06 PM | life generally meta-blogging
TrackBack URL for this entry:
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There are typos in the above post. I'm not going to fix them. Instead, I'm just checking to see if comments are actually working. ;-)
Posted by: ambimb at July 16, 2005 04:10 PM
The spam seems to have abated, at least from my end. I shut off comments in all posts older than 10 days. I also think the .htaccess banning you did helped quite a bit.
Posted by: Steve at July 16, 2005 04:24 PM
It's looks PHP-ish to me. I checked out the docs and it was actually in there http://us3.php.net/tokens
It seems related to parsing the double colon ::
It's also got some issue when referring to a null..
Posted by: Gary LaPointe ![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://mowabb.com/ai/nav-commenters.gif)
at July 16, 2005 05:38 PM
On a spam note: in MT blacklist I think the way my settings (see below) are great for blocking. I don't even bother with typekey; I hate to do anything to deter commentors.
I have my settings set for
Forced moderation - URL limit 4 urls
Block duplicate submissions is checked.
Forced moderation - Old entries 30 days
"Last approved comment" bypass 15 days
The 4 URLs really helps with the spammers with multiple URLs (although it's really 4 unique urls).
The ones with the days mean it's it's older than 30 days (and no one has successfully commented in the last 15 days then automatically moderate it). So pretty much all they can spam is recent stuff. You could probably even go lower like 10 and 5.
And I've discovered that setting the Comment Error Denial Response to something like: "Your __SUBMTYPE__ was denied for questionable content. The phrase __ITEM__ (__TEXT__ ) was the cause." is really helpful for when people are blocked to let them know why.
And I've set a million blockers for things like "/poker.htm" and "/casino-" that I've added to catch new domain names and this catches most of them
Posted by: Gary LaPointe at July 16, 2005 05:58 PM
welcome back :)
i wish you much happiness with the orange car. it's a tribute to your time in illini land, yes?
Posted by: j9 at July 16, 2005 06:11 PM
"the server seems glacially slow..."
Mua-ha-ha-ha! My diabolical plan is working! Mua-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!
Ahem.
Sorry, I slipped into character for a minute. For what it's worth, I've had no recent spam on my blog using WordPress... Not to gloat or anything. I'm just sayin'.
Posted by: Josh (Bad Glacier--get it? Glacier? Ha!) at July 16, 2005 08:13 PM
Thank you Gary!! Your tip about the PHP error saved the day for Blawg Wisdom! I think it's back to normal. I'll also take a look at those Blacklist settings. Maybe I can get more out of it. So far the measures we've taken are starting to show fairly good results, but we'll see how it goes...
j9: Thanks! But don't tell L. that her beautiful orange car could have anything to do w/the illini or suddenly we're going to have to go out and get something in yellow to support michigan instead!
Josh: Yeah, I've been thinking about that a lot recently -- WordPress just doesn't seem to have the spam problems that MT does. Why not? Is it because MT is a bigger target since there are more MT blogs, or ?? Whatever the cause, MT's biggest flaw at the moment is spam. Even Blogger does a better job of controlling spam, and that's saying something that's really incredibly not good for MT.
Posted by: ambimb at July 17, 2005 06:35 AM
Oh no! Did we jinx you with all our talk of cars? Maybe the universe heard L. talking about how much she wanted the orange car.
But cruise control (which my car lacks, sadly) and the peace of mind that comes with being able to drive somewhere and not worry about the car breaking down are wonderful things. It'll be worth it.
And I'm glad you made it back safe and sound.
Posted by: raquel at July 18, 2005 10:54 AM
I don't think you jinxed anything, but I do know that E's praise of the Cobalt may have ultimately sealed the deal b/c after that it was not only orange but also "E said it was a good car." He can send is part of the payments to:
Just kidding!
Cruise control rocks and reliability also. I actually didn't worry too much about the reliability of the old beater, but I obviously will worry even less about this one. Plus, it has a spoiler, so what's not to love? ;-)
Thanks again to you and E. for showing us a great time in Indy!
Posted by: ambimb at July 19, 2005 05:03 AM
Heh. I told E. you'd bought the Cobalt, and he nodded sagely and said, "Good choice." (As for the payments, I just saw how much my student loan payment went up thanks to new interest rates--about $40 a month--so we don't have any money to offer you. Plus there's that whole wedding thing. :) )
It was great to see you guys; I'm just sorry it was a bit of a rush. We're happy to have you any time. Maybe we'll even have baseboards when you visit next.
Posted by: raquel at July 19, 2005 11:36 AM
