Damn Comment Spammers

by Danny Sullivan on November 30, 2006

in Blogs & Feeds

I know TypeKey is a hassle commenting here, but I took it down two days ago
to test some things at the
Daily SearchCast site. I haven’t been
back to switch it on until today. Fortunately, Movable Type also has some
built-in spam filtering tools. Eleven completely junk spams were caught, in that
time. Yeah, it could have been a lot more for some sites, I know. Still, I was
surprised that a site which was closed to open comments for so long so quickly
got hit once the barriers were lifted. They’re back up now.

One thing annoys me, though. Movable Type is set to let any authenticated
commenter (that should be anyone using TypeKey) post immediately. But the
separate "Junk Threshold" detector still seems to kick in, causing some posts to
get held. I’m adjusting that. Overall, the system has been really helpful. For
Search Engine Land, we’ll use it
initially until we can get our own comment registration system in place.

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{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }

1 SearchRank November 30, 2006 at 11:21 pm

I experience the same thing at my Blog which is powered by Movable Type. I have found several valid comments filter into the Junk Comments so I make it a point to try to skim through those every couple of days to see if MT pushed anything in their by mistake.

2 Caydel December 9, 2006 at 5:35 am

I must admit -I’m not really a fan of typekey, or at least blogs where I have to use it to post – that will usually stop me from commenting.
Kind of ironic that I am posting that line on a Type-key blog…
Anyways, have you thought about moving to Akismet for Movable Type? Akismet has had a 100% catch rate for me, no false positives yet, and is completely invisible to the visitors. It would save them all the hassle of getting a Typekey acount in order to post…
Here’s the URL for the plugin: http://akismet.com/blog/2006/04/for-mt/

3 Danny Sullivan December 10, 2006 at 6:59 pm

I’ll take a look and appreciate the plug-in URL. My main hesitation is that I’ve heard that Akismet doesn’t let site owners override its blacklists. For example, I think I’m on the blacklist (no idea why, I promise, I’m innocent), and so when I posted to one blog recently, the owner told me he couldn’t get my post up.

Leave a Comment

Thinking of dropping your link spam? Consider this. Seriously, STOP & READ. The guy who runs Google's spam fighting team? I know him pretty well. In fact, it's sort of a joke between us to see what's the latest absurd link drop I can share. So if you want your site to be a poster child on his idiots wall -- and probably to encounter a Google penalty -- go ahead, drop your link. It's nofollow anyway, plus I do have built-in spam fighting and what gets past that usually gets nabbed in a few minutes to a few hours. So you got to ask yourself. Are you feeling lucky?

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