The flow of spam comments keep increasing even I keep a blacklist and also make sure the ones that escape blacklist filter gets deleted. This takes a good half hour during weekends. To cut this maintenance time, I finally decided to cut the HTML in comments which would discourage spammers from leaving a comment. I’ve done that and am happy the last few days spam comments have reduced by half.
The recent fad is to move to WordPress and many known bloggers have moved out of MT and Blogger. I am contemplating to do this but the only thing that stops me from doing are these spammers. The spam issues that I’m facing with MT wouldn’t be resolved with WP too and hence moving out would re-energise me psychologically but would leave me doing the same blog maintenance during weekends. As rambled before, one thing that I want to do is to switch back to blogger. I’ve even written emails to the blogger team asking them to include the import entries option in blogger. They seem to be doing everything else except this. They even have AJAX technology for their commenting system but an import from other blogging tool is yet to be fixed. Huh !!
My instinct says that google in the coming year, might hugely invest in Blogger and would probably come-up with a tool like Picasa which can be downloaded to the client machine and run blogs from there. If they could pad a host of other utilities by studying the competing blogging products, blogger will continue to be the most successful blogging tool.
P.S – I’ve also tweaked my commenting system in the blog. The comments which were appearing old-to-new for the last few weeks, will continue to appear new-to-old in descending order as such.
kirukkal.com 
13 responses to “Movable Type ya Blogger whine – Redux”
Are you actually getting that much spam on MT.
Best thing to avoid spam, at the addition of a small hassle to users – is to use a captcha – there are some online services which offer captchas for MT comments.
simpler yet – is to use a turing test – something like asking users to type in the sum of two and three – most spam bots cannot do that.
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Guru,
Are u seriously getting that much of spam? And yes, the turing test wud be a good idea, or use moderation for the comments.
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Sat, Thanks for the recommendation of turing test. haven’t heard of it before.
Sriram, Last week, I had 1100 spam comments. Imagine what happens to my ‘mySQL’ dB. Modreation is something that I hate. It spoils the entire idea of comments.
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Guru,
In WordPress, there is an option called as Spam Karma. It is highly customizable and very very effective. Anita Bora was also facing this spam thing in MT and moved to WordPress. There is no Spam now 🙂
Check it out.
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Hi Lazy and all
I really appreciate your blog.
Also, please take the time to check out mine, its a little amateurish but I assure it has good content.
http://blogpur.blogspot.com
Thanks
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Your blog looks neat.
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Guru,
I guess the spam is the “high” price of fame ;). Wait.. so if I ever get as popular as you have got (which ain’t gonna happen, but let’s look at a hypothetical scenario), then I’m gonna get spammed as well? NOooooooooo.. Time to run away.
Jokes apart, I think you are doing an awesome job, and don’t let the spammers bog you down. (Yeah yea, same old retarded statements, but hey, that’s me ;))
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Prabhu, Sollitala!! Ok. I read about Spam Karma seems a better bet than blacklist. Let’s see.. Hopefully will move from MT to WP.
Venkat, So you finally got a blog. Way to go.
Jag – thanks.
Sriram, Nice words. Thanks.
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LG,
I still don’t get it.how do you think the comment system of ‘new to old in descending order’ is convenient ? we’ll have to scroll to the bottom and then move our way up.I thought the other way was more user-friendly.
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Guru, I agree with shiva, I think that older to newer ordering of comments is better.
Regarding comment spam, I haven’t faced this with Yakkerati on my site, but maybe it might pick up later.
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Hey Lazy, i remember you saying something after Blogger changed its commenting system. Do you remember ?
http://www.lazygeek.net/archives/2005/02/blogger_comments_update.html
ask google for the service, and you might end up getting one.
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Shiva/Nirenjan, Order of comments changed back to ascending mode now. Thanks for suggestion. My only idea of having comments in descending fashion was that it was closer to the analogy of blogs, Fresh comes first.
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I think the easiest way to cut down on spam is to disable comments & trackback on older posts. You could try that, at the very least, it should cut down on your spam comments by about 50 %, if not more. For an example on this, check out the earlier post you made on Blogger’s comments. After Feb 15th, the only comments are spam ones.
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