Roblog

I finally had to do something about the comment spam invading my weblog, since it was now affecting my wife's blog. She told me recently "I hate the computer," meaning that the increasing tide of comment spam was rendering her blog unusable, as well as cluttering up her inbox with continual reminders of that fact.

Movable Type has a facility whereby you can block specific IP addresses from placing comments on your blog, but this requires each and every IP address to be logged manually into the system. That's what I had been doing for this blog, but I was up to 103 IP adresses with no noticeable change in amount of comment spam.

So I did some research. The best option appeared to be the MT-Blacklist plug-in. This free add-on for Movable Type checks a master list of URLs that spammers include in their comments. Whenever a comment is added to a blog entry that references one of those URLs, it is prevented from being saved. It has regular expression pattern matching, so that it doesn't have to be updated for every variation of a website selling "cialis". You can try it, if you want. Try adding a comment with a URL that has "vioxx" in it. You'll get an error message saying the comments couldn't be saved.

This appears to be working well. Not only will this help Donna continue to use her blog, but it will make our presentation in Boston about using weblogs go much better. I would hate for her to have to say "I hate my computer" several times during her talk.