It has been three and a half years since I last battled comment spam. Back then, it was reducing my server to a burbling mass that was embarrassing because it was introducing grade-schoolers and there parents to all sorts of sex related sites. To combat the problem, I developed a number of measures that made it harder to add comment spam and easier to delete it. My measures worked and comment spam disappeared as a problem.

At the same time, Userland developed tools to combat comment spam that made it into the upgrade cycle.

When I upgraded my server, my changes were lost and my sites weren't set up to take advantage of Userland's enhancements. As a result, my sites were once again open to comment spam.

Fortunately, it took a few months for the spammers to figure this out. But once they did, they hit the sites hard. Within a week, I had over 1000 spam comments on a single post.

But with Manila 9.6, I was able to implement some changes to stem the flow of new comment spam. Then I utilized some of my old code to remove the new spam comments expeditiously. It still took a few hours work, but that is better than the weeks of work it would have taken.

As of today, our sites are pretty much spam free.

Posted by Tom Clifton on 5/2/10; 10:03:56 PM from the Hosting dept.  #