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Spam Sausage Spam Spam Bacon Spam Tomato and Spam

I think there are only two Movable Type users who read this blog, but they might find this MT comment spam blocker useful. After less than a month of using MT at the OC Online, I have already found one comment spam on my first post. I deleted it, but Im sure theres more where that one came from. This spam blocker uses a constantly updated blacklist of spamming websites that works similarly to updating your anti-virus softwares virus list.
I hope that this will kick the ass of most of the comment spam that comes this way.

Ive also enabled “e-mail comments” on MT so users of this blog will be notified when someone has posted a comment to their blog entry. This way, if comment spam appears on one of their posts they can let me know and I can delete it and blacklist the spammer. I may centralize the process by having everyones profile e-mail address set to our Darkwing account so comments and such get sent to only one e-mail address that can be checked in the office but Ill bring this up for discussion at the next OC meeting.

Note: This could potentially be used as a defense against attempted puppy bombings. Yes, I’m looking at you, FLOG.

via Portland blogger Jack Bog

  1. Timothy says:

    John, yeah, we’ve got that box checked but there’s something about the img src tag that MT comments won’t let fly. this link to the ODE site. So our HTML tags work just fine, but MT hates the img src tag…there is no justice, nor puppies.

  2. JohnH says:

    In Blog Config -> Preferences, there is an ‘ Allow HTML in comments?’ checkbox – without this, there is no HTML commands allowed (including img, a href, bold, etc)

  3. Timothy says:

    I can’t get mozilla to work right with my gladstone account, maybe I’ll get you to help me set it up…my yahoo account is what gets the comment emails, so my filtering is reasonably sidetracked by that, turn it back on and I’ll deal. There are worse things, I’ll just sort them into a folder by hand.

  4. Sho says:

    Agreed. A personal option would be the best. I think I’ll turn the feature off for now and we’ll talk about it at the meeting.

    Regarding the filter: can you set up a filter that’s based off of subject lines and not the “from” field? That way any subject with the words “New Comment” can be put into a certain folder or something. Is that what you’re going for?

    Personally, I like using Mozilla Thunderbird, which is free, for my e-mail client on my computer because it has good filters for the comments to my posts.

  5. Timothy says:

    I just wish it was a personal option instead of blog-wide. I could set them up so that they’ll go to the darkwing account, but then I’ll not get regular notifications either. I’d just set up a filter, but the “from” in the email is whatever folks enter in the email box, not something like notify@ocblog or whatever, so a filter just won’t work because webmail sucks at such things.

  6. Sho says:

    I noticed that the img tags didn’t work when I saw the source code for the Haymarket comment that was posted on May 1. I don’t know if there’s a way to change that, but I suppose it’s built into Movable Type for the purposes of blocking inappropriate images from spammers and trolls. Puppy bombs are apparently included in the block list.

    Re: The e-mailing of comments

    I think this is a very important feature. This way we can be alerted to any comment spam that appears on our posts. If it’s preferable, you can set your e-mail address to the Darkwing account so that all comments can go there for review instead of your inbox. We can discuss this at the next meeting.

  7. Timothy says:

    Speaking of puppy-bombs, why don’t the img src tags work in the comments? Further, why isn’t there a personal option for emailing comments instead of a whole blog one? I don’t want that shit, but apparently Sho does…gah, further, blech!

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