[m i a o w] the cat: Death By Spam

July 05, 2004

Death By Spam

Oh my god. You might (or might not) have noticed that this site ceased to exist for a while today. I had been kicked off my server - as a letter to my very nice hosting people pointed out:
"...this account cannot stay on the server, so either modify its scripts, or move the account to a different or dedicated server."
Apparently some kind of "blog script was executed several hundred times per second, causing the server to appear virtually down". So when I logged on this morning, I got my host webpage - no miaow to be seen. It's only now that NiceMartin has resurrected miaow by moving me elsewhere that I've finally figured out what happened. I was taken out by comment-spam. Yep. Killed off.

Over 110 comments in a night - all of the spammy kind. This really sucks - I am going to attempt an upgrade to Movable Type 3 tonight and see if that helps. Kartar's comment sounded like a good idea. After I finally get through deleting them all, that is. God - this all happens when I'm already feeling all tainted from the discovery that some private company has my DNA. Great.

Posted by b:p at July 5, 2004 07:57 PM | TrackBack

Comments

There are simpler ways of stopping comment spam than upgrading; I think renaming mt-comments.cgi to something else's one. A Google search on "movable type" "comment spam" or similar may be helpful.

(There was also a bit of a fracas about the license for MT 3 recently; at least two people I know have since moved to WordPress.)

Posted by: acb on July 5, 2004 09:25 PM

Indeed there are other options than an MT upgrade - have a look at http://www.jayallen.org/projects/mt-blacklist/ or http://www.johnwehr.com/spamwait/. What version of MT do you have now? If you're a version or two behind then the last V2 release - 2.66 I think - should help.

Or if you want a hand changing to another flavour of Weblog I'd be happy to help. :) I can recommend pMachine - the free version should handle all of your requirements. Or Wordpress is a damn fine product. Probably given the style of your site Wordpress would be a better choice.

Posted by: kartar on July 5, 2004 10:37 PM

Hmmm. I am looking at Wordpress now. I do use Jay Allen's blacklist already - but that didn't help me last night. I was running MT 2.63, but have just checked and seem to be running version 1.2!? Very perplexing and I have no email or access to my ftp account at present so I can't start changing or improving anything. All very frustrating.

I have read about the MT 3.0 license issues, but they don't affect me as I only run my own blog and thus wouldn't have to pay for a license. Am not sure what to do - will see if I get slaughtered again tonight! *sigh*

Posted by: beTh on July 5, 2004 10:55 PM