A victory in the battle against spam
I am now prepared to declare victory in my private battle against the spam bots.
As you may recall, I complained repeatedly -- here, here and here -- about the massive quantity of comment and trackback spam to which this little blog has been subjected daily. There were times when I'd come home from work and see where the bots had spammed me hundreds of times. I'd go through and manually delete the spam -- which advertised everything from discounted mortgage interest rates to the vilest forms of pornography -- but that quickly became a time-consuming pain in the butt. I had to find another way.
Among other things, I changed hosting providers. My new provider, Hosting Matters, offers spam filtering. In fact, since I made the change, I haven't been spammed once. Hosting Matters also installed for me MT-Blacklist, a Moveable Type plugin designed to prevent comment and trackback spam. And now I myself have installed MT-Conversation Killer, another Moveable Type plugin that automatically closes older blog entries to comments and trackbacks. Older entries are the spam bots' favorite. (Note: I have Conversation Killer set to close entries more than 5 days old. So if you attempt to comment on, or trackback to, such an entry, you'll find that you can't, even if you have a TypeKey.)
These plugins are in addition to the No Follow plugin Six Apart provided with the release of Movable Type 3.16, the platform on which this blog operates. No Follow instructs the Google bots to ignore hyperlinks provided by the spam bots. This defeats the purpose of blog spam, which is to improve the advertiser's search engine ranking.
It's been days now since I've had to deal with any spam at all. But while I can declare victory -- I hope not prematurely so -- in my own small corner of the battlefield, I fear the larger fight may yet be lost. (See "Bloggers declare war on comment spam, but can they win?" from the Online Journalism Review at USC Annenburg.) Few second and third tier bloggers are going to spend the money and time I have to defeat the spam bots. Instead, they're going to turn off comments and trackbacks altogether. And when they do, two of the features that made the blogosphere a form of interactive media will be lost. And that's a damn shame.
(Want to do what you can to defeat the spam bots while preserving your ability to comment on blog posts? Get a TypeKey. You don't have to use your real name or your real e-mail address. All you have to do is register, something the bots can't do. You'll then have a consistent online identity that you can use on any Movable Type blog that requires comment registration as a countermeasure to spam.)
UPDATE -- Per Jeremy's suggestion in a comment below, I've also installed SpamLookup, which appears to be a very powerful anti-spam plugin indeed. (Thanks for the pointer, Jerm!)