Sorry - authentication required for commenting

Wed, 04/04/2007 - 10:41 -- James Oakley

Sorry everyone

I've just had to delete 280 spam comments, going back only a week or so. MovableType has an excellent junk comment filter - 280 comments got caught and marked as junk, and I only got notified by e-mail of 10 comments that were spam. Still - I have to glance down the junk comment list to make sure I've not deleted a genuine comment.

So, hate to do it, but I've had to go to authenticated-only commenting.

Movable Type (of which this blog is an instance) uses TypeKey for this. All you do is create a TypeKey account. You then sign in and have the option to stay signed in for a fortnight. You're then allowed to comment again. As a bonus, you only have to type your name once.

Sorry about that - I'll look into introducing some human-only security feature to weed out the spambots, then I should be able to go allow anonymous comments again.

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ros's picture
Submitted by ros on

Wonder why certain blogs are more/less susceptible to spam? I've been blogging for over a year and I've had hardly any spam comments (maybe a dozen or so all told). I get random comments quite often from odd people who use the same blog provider I do, but usually they're just unbelievers picking a fight, rather than automatic trawlers looking to pounce on unsuspecting victims. 280 in a week seems extraordinary! Did you do anything to attract them?

James Oakley's picture
Submitted by James Oakley on

Don't know why some more than others. I don't do anything to attract them - your pagerank is actually slightly higher than mine, so more / better webpages link to your blog than mine. If anything yours should attract more spam.

I can tell you why yours is immune, though. When you go to enter a comment, you have to type the validation code in. That technology is designed so that only a human eye can decipher the validation code (for the time being!). So spambots are locked out. I need to find a MovableType plugin that does something similar.

On the bright side, now you're posting as an authenticated commenter, I can tell my blog to automatically trust your comments. They now get published without the need for my approval first. I might regret that ;-)

ros's picture
Submitted by ros on

Ah, of course. I'd forgotten about the verification mine always asks for. And it's so sensitive that it frequently rejects the comments of real people too (seems to have been better about that lately, I hope).

How do I know what pagerank I have?

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