It seems just as spammers decided to start targeting blogs, we (or more accurately more able, less lazy people) have come up with all kinds of solutions to keep our blogs spam free. Jay Allen’s “MT Blacklist”:http://www.jayallen.org/journey/2003/10/mtblacklist_stop_spam_now works like a charm and really should be a feature of MT itself. James Seng’s “elegant solution(James Seng’s Blog – Solution for comments spams)”:http://james.seng.cc/archives/000145.html using automatic image generation to determine if a poster is very nice and works well if you don’t mind making your comments less accessible. Now James has created a “Bayesian filter for MT(James Seng’s Blog – Bayesian filter for MT)”:http://james.seng.cc/archives/000152.html which I’m installing as we speak, and I found out that Feedster are attempting to generate a “definitive blacklist list of spammers(Feedster – OPML in Action : Updates to the Comment Spammer BlackList)”:http://www.feedster.com/blog/archives/187_OPML_in_Action__Updates_to_the_Comment_Spammer_BlackList.html. The only problem with Feedster’s list is that its OPML which means I have to cut and paste to get it in to MT Blacklist, and they seem to have very few entries right now, although this should be rectified when I send them my list of 500+ IP addresses.
_Update_: You can report spam to Feedster to get IP’s added to their OPML file by using “this interface(Feedster – Report a comment spammer)”:http://www.feedster.com/commentspam.php.
_Update 16-Oct-03, 12:37_: OK, as Jay helpfully pointed out I am of course putting URL’s rather than IP addresses in MT Blacklist. For those who care, you can see my blacklist “here(magpiebrain – Spammer blacklist)”:http://www.magpiebrain.com/blacklist.txt.
magpiebrain 
4 Responses to “Spammers beware – here be bloggers!”
Why are you putting IP addresses in your MT-Blacklist blacklilst? You’ll never match anything with those, so you are simply increasing the execution time of the script.
MT-Blacklist is a content filter/blacklist. Not an IP blacklist.
Don’t worry – only proper URL’s are going into the MT Blacklist – blame me being up to my eyes in the INetAddress class in Java when making the post. I had IP addresses on the brain!
I don’t think that IP banning will be effective. It’s to simple to change IPs.
And what’s about faked entries? they could ratten the whole system.
I agree that IP banning is not effective, however Jay’s MT-Blacklist works using domain names, which is more effective – it takes time ot get and register new domains.