Friday, September 24, 2004

Killing Comment Spam

If you haven't been reading a lot of comments in this blog from a guy named bob about various male hormonal supplements, or inviting you to play games of chance and meet eligible singles through your browser, it's because I have written a little tool to help me clean up comment spam.

Movable Type 2.661, which is what this blog runs on, has a wonderful interface in many ways, but it's a hassle to delete unwanted comments. Oh, you can do it, one comment at a time, but I want to instantly be able to look at a list of all the recent comments, check off the ones that are spam, and then delete the comments and ban the IP addresses they came from in One Fell Swoop.

Maybe Movable Type 3 lets you do this. I'm not sure -- I can't be bothered to upgrade.

So I wrote this tool to do just what I want. I'm very pleased with it. I also hacked the movable type code in lib/MT/App/Comments.pm to send me the link to the spam-killer in my inbox whenever I get spam (here is the diff).

If I get 20 pieces of comment-spam (splog?), cleaning them up and IP-banning them takes 22 clicks from the moment the mail arrives in my Inbox.

The spammers and I are now in a race, to see whether they can register or subvert new IP addresses faster than I can click. I like my odds.

I am too lazy to do more with this, but I mention it because I know lots of people use Movable Type for blogging. Consider the code GPL'd, and if anyone actually wants to clean it up and submit it properly to Movable Type themselves or any appropriate ancillary open source project, I'd be overjoyed.