Just looking through the logs, always interesting reading to see what weird search terms people use on the site, when I ran across an MT-Blacklist comment denial from IP 68.173.7.113 — which is one of the New York based Road Runner servers.
On 10 January, over a period of six minutes, this particular comment spammer — pushing sex, drugs, weight loss, baldness cures and, would you believe, online privacy — tried to spam the site 93 times. A handful snuck through, bringing the hit up to a hundred, and all were promptly added to my blacklist and submitted to Jay Allen’s Comment Spam Clearinghouse. After the initial assault, the spammer must have decided to test the waters and sent a single spam two and half hours later, with a follow up an hour after that. Both were denied.
And on other site related matters, we’ve just updated MovableType to version 2.661, which has added a throttling measure so that comments from the same IP address can be limited over a set time period, an automatic IP address ban based on an abnormal number of comments from the same address in a short period of time and the format of links in comments has been changed to redirects to stop spammers trying to boost their PageRank.
Unfortunately, there’s an XHTML bug in the MT update that was only partially fixed by the 2.661 release. Jacques Distler has a patch available to fix the problem.
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