mamamusings

elizabeth lane lawley's thoughts on technology, academia, family, and tangential topics

Sunday, 20 August 2006

spam kills (sites)

Saturday morning, I received an email from my hosting company telling me that they had shut down mamamusings.net due to “excessive load” issues, and that I needed to contact the abuse department to get things running again.

The culprit? Comment and trackback spam.

I have it all set to be moderated here, which means you seldom see it, but it’s been increasing at a depressing rate, and it takes a lot of time to clean out the trash sitting in the “unapproved” list every day.

For the time being, they’ve disabled the mt-trackback and mt-comment scripts, so that at least the content of the site is accessible. And I’ll start working on a solution. The easiest option would be to simply restrict commenting to users with TypeKey accounts. I hate to do that, but it may be my best option.

What I may try for the short term is a two-fold approach—renaming the script (so that it’s a little more work for the spambots to find it), and adding a CAPTCHA. Until I get that done, however, you won’t be able to comment here. :(

Posted at 8:47 AM in: on blogging | technology
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Liz sipping melange at Cafe Central in Vienna