Les Jones

Blogging > Most Comment Spam Ever

I started deleting a few spams this morning, which was easy thanks to Jay Allen's MT-Blacklist. After deleting 25 (the default setting), there were more. So I deleted another 25. Then I noticed the comment count:

My comment count should be about 1500 or so. A spammer hit my site with almost 3,000 comment spams, which works out to three comments for every post I've written in a year and a half. Lousy SOB. I'm cleaning them up right now with MT-Blacklist. If I hadn't installed it the other week I'd sure be installing it now. Clearly, the spammers are using automated spam-posting tools, and bloggers need automated spam-deleting tools.

LATER: Finished. Here's a tip that helped speed up comment deletion tremendously: uncheck the "Rebuild the relevant entries after comment deletion" box in MT-Blacklist. Otherwise the comment gets deleted, then Movable Type rebuilds the page the comments are on (Movable Type is notoriously slow at rebuilding pages).

Unchecking that box also prevents some problems with 500 Internal Server errors during the deletion process. I deleted all the spam via MT-Blacklist, then rebuilt the site using Movable Type's Rebuild Site button. Also, you can go into MT-Blacklist's Configure screen and change the default from 25 to something higher. I discovered that I was able to delete 1000 spams at a time, as long as "Rebuild the relevant entries after comment deletion" was unchecked.

LATER STILL: LateFinal got hit with 1,000 spams last night, and I'd bet there are other blogs getting hit. For reference purposes, the spam on my site came from the royaladult domain.