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More Spamments Getting Through

This morning I had to delete two junk mails that got through SpamSieve. It stands out because it happens so rarely - SpamSieve is over 99% effective.

This morning (it's not yet 11am) I've already deleted about 50 spamments that have made it through on NSLog();. They aren't being published because, fortunately, they have three URLs and I only allow two for automatic publication. They have:

  1. A changing IP address (so I can't block them that way)
  2. Different names and email addresses (so I can't block them that way)
  3. Near-gibberish content that says "Some friends told me about this site, and now i'm glad they told me about it…" before it links to three sites.

The sites are different each time and include non-obnoxious sites like cnn.com, irobotmovie.com, and more. The links and the entire comment have nothing to do with the blog entry.

During MovableType 3.2's development I heard from a reputable source that there would be a Bayesian (like SpamSieve) filter for MovableType. I am sure it would catch these kinds of items. Where is it? MT-Bayesian is dead. Perhaps Michael is interested in making SpamSieve for MovableType? I'd give him another $29 or whatever it costs…

Order of Operations
I currently have two spam-blocking things installed for MovableType. Email Blacklister deletes certain email addresses and comes in handy when spammers stupidly use the same URL to keep spamming you (even if they change the IP address, content, etc.). They do this so that the user can become "trusted" or known by your spam filters. Then they come in and spam you, certain the comments will remain.

The second is the built-in SpamLookup, which does IP/domain name checks to see if the IP address is valid. It catches 99% of the junk that's collected by MovableType and overall does a pretty good job.

Imagine now that I added SpamSieve or some other spam-blocking tool. Clearly I'd want to set up an order of operations so that every filter wasn't run every time someone wrote in. That order, for me, would be 1) Blacklister, 2) SpamLookup, 3) Bayesian. I'd want email notifications on the first and the third, but not the second, largely because the second catches the bulk of the problems and I trust it to do so, but I'd want to keep an eye on the other two.

Both the order of operations AND specifying different feedback preferences are not possible in MovableType 3.2.

2 Responses to "More Spamments Getting Through"

  1. I've had great success with Akismet. It's so good that I've disabled all other spam protection. I've had ZERO false positives among the ~800 spams (and one proper comment...) it filtered so far.

    AFAIK, it's only available for WordPress right now. But the API is open, so an MT plugin shouldn't take too long to appear.

  2. I'm having the exact same spam comments posted on my site, which, strangely was actually deactivated, but the WordPress backend is still there. Just a placeholder index.html.

    I'm using Spam Karma 2 (WP-only plugin) and it's getting all of it. I started noticing because I had never recieved digests of the spam blocked, for I had no spam previously.

    I haven't tried Akismet, but I know many people who have had 0 spam getting through, with *only* Akismet, no SK, Bad Behavior, or anything.