At last, I have found a solution to the blog spam problem. Aside from upgrading to the latest version of movabletype, I stumbled across a plugin called MT-Blacklist that someone mentioned over on Mike Pusateri's site.MT-Blacklist is a powerful filtering tool that works off a huge list of known spammers. However instead of trying to focus on moving or mutable targets (e.g. IP addresss, keywords, SMTP relays, etc), MT-Blacklist works because it focuses on one that is far more difficult to change and is in fact, the most important part of the spam: the spamvertised URL. That coupled with a centralized database that is constantly updated, and you have a solid defense against spam, both in comments and in trackbacks. It's CAKE to install. I had it up and running in about five minutes. Take a look at some of the features:
- Content-based comment/trackback spam blocking.
- Search & De-spam mode provides one-step de-spamming of all of your blogs.
- Extremely easy installation and upgrades. Works right out of the "box" with No modifications to your templates or the MT source code.
- Web interface for all plugin administration functions
- Protection is configurable on a weblog-by-weblog basis
- Default blacklist contains over 450 known spam strings for immediate protection on install.
- Uses MT's native user permission model for administrative functions
- MT Activity log record of configuration and blacklist changes as well as optional logging of denied comments/trackbacks
- Optional automatic web publishing of blacklist
- Blacklist importing supported
- Seamless support for Perl regular expressions in blacklist
- Individual annotations supported for each blacklist entry
So I'm hoping this is the end of my spam problem. In the meantime, I encourage you to check it out, and let me know how it works for you. Tricia, Deanne, and Andrew, your blogs should now be spam free!