Good piece by Ben about the increase in comment spam which is apparently crippling some servers running Moveable Type. This site runs on MT and I get quiet a lot of comment spam, but it doesn’t seem to be having a major impact on the site’s performance yet (I hope no-one sees that as a challenge!)
Of course the comment spammers are slowly cutting their own throats. They do it because getting links from other sites will increase their site’s Google ranking. But if a site gets so much comment spam that the site goes offline then it becomes useless to them.
Moveable Type is particularly targetted as it’s so popular. Users of other blogging software don’t get the same level of problem. I’ve been thinking of moving to something else for some time. Perhaps I’ll give that some more serious thought over the christmas break.
My comment spam has dropped to practically nil (~1 per month from about 5-6 per day) since I removed the action=””s from my forms and hacked my apache config a bit. This appears to confuse spambots for some reason. ;-)Sadly, once you know the trick it’s trivial to route around (like changing the script name from mt-comments.cgi) but it works for now and is sufficiently geeky that it isn’t likely to gain mass adoption (and thus attention) any time soon.