Everybody’s getting MT Comment Spam

I’m glad to know I’m not the only one that’s getting hammered with this stuff. Granted, I maybe get 1 or 2 spam comments a day, but nothing major. This site just ain’t that popular. But it still annoys me to have to delete them.

But every MovableType user is getting these spam. Hell, just look at all the posts about it at popdex. This is obviously a big problem. Six Apart has an official response.

The problem with 90% of the solutions? They involve hacking the CGI scripts and files. While this isn’t a problem, you’d better damn well better know what you did, otherwise when you upgrade to a new version of MT, your changes will be overwritten. But the MT-Blacklist plugin looks like it will help quite a bit (I haven’t looked at the install instructions as of yet, as it was just released about five minutes ago). I’m also considering adding a graphical feature that only humans can decode (similar to what you see when you register on PayPal). And there are a bunch of solutions posted here that could very easily lessen the stress on the comment system.

But what’s the problem with all of these? Most of them require changing the MT CGI and PM libraries. I don’t have a problem at all with changing my templates, as they don’t get overwritten on an upgrade, but my CGI and PM files will.

What needs to happen? Six Apart needs to integrate some of these features into the core MovableType installation in it’s long-overdue next version, that way we won’t be required to do all this hacking ourselves. But you know what they’ll probably do? They’ll probably put all these features into TypePad, and will eventually put them in the main MT distro. Only time will tell.