Will's blog

purpose: Will Kahn-Greene's blog of Miro, PyBlosxom, Python, GNU/Linux, random content, PyBlosxom, Miro, and other projects mixed in there ad hoc, half-baked, and with a twist of lemon

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Mon, 21 Dec 2009

Dealing with comment spam

Someone spammed my blog with 400+ comments for some shoes site. Took me less than 2 minutes to skim the emails, see the pattern, and then remove all the spam from my comments moderator queue. This sort of thing is the big strength of PyBlosxom.

I have my blog set up to store comments as individual text files in a comments/ directory. All comments have to be approved before they make it to the site. Approved comments end in .cmt and comments in the moderator queue end in .cmt-. Additionally, comments that contain one of a series of blacklisted words are rejected automatically. Any time someone posts a comment, I get an email.

It took me a minute to skim my 400+ emails and notice they're all kind of the same, 10 seconds to update the blacklist so that I won't get any additional comments like this in the future, and 10 seconds to remove all the spam from the queue with: 

   for mem in `grep -rl spamwordhere *`; do rm $mem; done

That was it--spam gone in less than 2 minutes. Took longer to write the blog post about it.

[ tags: blog, pyblosxom | category: /site | Permalink | View/Add Comments: 1 ]

Comments:

Posted by Ryan on Mon Dec 21 17:09:22 2009
agreed! the ajax support also doubles nicely as a spam filter, since almost no comment spam robots parse javascript. with that, i only see around one spam comment per month, and i haven't heard any complaints from people who have javascript turned off.


Post a new comment:

Three things:

  1. New comments get placed in a "draft" status and will NOT show up on the site until I explicitly approve it. Sometimes that happens within 24 hours.
  2. I reserve the right to reject/remove inappropriate comments.
  3. Sometimes I'll reply to a comment directly in email--so make sure your email address is correct.

If you can't for some reason post a comment, send me an email: willg at bluesock dot org.

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Copyright 1996 to 2012, Will Guaraldi Kahn-Greene, under the Creative Commons BY-SA 3.0 license

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