The amount of comment spam this site gets has gone up by an order of magnitude or two in the last week or so. And it looks like I'm not the only one to be suffering.
The server is just about keeping up with the load, but it's probably just a matter of time before it all collapses in a broken heap (that's not why my blog was missing all day yesterday - that was me breaking stuff). If the site isn't as responsive as usual then I'm sorry, but I'm doing what I can.
Of course, no spam comment ever gets published on this site. Most of them get caught by the junk filter and all the rest get held for moderation and, eventually, deleted. So the spammers are just wasting their time (and my CPU cycles).
I'm not usually a violent person, but spammers make me want to go out and break legs.
Does anyone have any suggestions for hardening a Movable Type installation?
I maintain a fairly heavily visited MT based site for my wife. A couple of things I did that have worked rather well are: 1) Close old comments. I wrote a quick script that runs nightly in cron to automatically turn off comments for entries that are at least 20 days old. 2) Rename mt-comments.cgi to something the spammers are unlikely to guess. Update your MT config and rebuild any static pages so that any reference to mt-comments.cgi goes away.
YMMV of course but this approach has worked rather well for me.
Kevin,
Thanks for the suggestions. I'm not keen on the first one as one of the joys of running this blog is the fact that people keep coming across old entries and commenting on them. I have closed comments on a couple of entries that seemed to be becoming particular hotspots for comment spam.
I used to have a renamed mt-comments.cgi. I think that changed must have been reverse when I upgraded to MT3. I'll reinstate it over the weekend.