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May 02, 2005
technical problems, getting help and tiny victories against the spam misery in the world
i've been silent for the last couple of weeks. there are times that i go silent because i need a break or i'm overworked...but this time it i was in a protracted battle against comment/trackback spammers.
i shut down my comments last December after getting slammed with over 10,000 comment spams in less than a week. i set MT to force manual approval of all comments before they posted...but this became enormously inefficient at that scale.
i was sad to close comments, but i was overworked and didn't have time to upgrade/install plugins etc. etc. that is required to get a handle on the situation.
THEN i started getting trackback spam, which was just too much. after struggling for 2 days to upgrade MT, install MT blacklist and incorporate the little tweaks necessary...naturally i ended up breaking a few things.
so (for once) taking ariel's advice i turned to blog barter to get it all configured correctly for a very reasonable trade for something on my "expert's" wishlist.
(which, after the fact i just charged over to her wishlist and picked out something nice in the quoted price range, as though it was christmas. note to novices in getting help, you're supposed to agree to it first. fortunately she was very polite about the whole thing.)
at any rate...after tediously deleting all 10,000 comments spams (btw, martin i think i deleted a comment from you by mistake, sorry), i have opened comments back up and have missed hearing from my friends and family.
particularly those that (mistakenly) believe that reading my blog is just like staying in touch with me. a common problem i think, and as usual, ariel expresses this weird phenom better than i could.
so i'll be posting more regularly, and i hope the handful of folks that read along make a little noise from time to time. after all the trouble i went through it's the least you can do.
Posted by heidijanet at May 2, 2005 12:02 PM
Comments
Did you have your blogbarter expert insall this plugin? http://bradchoate.com/projects/spamlookup/
It blocks, on average, 1000+ comment/trackback spams for me EVERY 24 HOURS! Jesus. Amazing.
Posted by: Ariel ![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://www.inretrospect.org/nav-commenters.gif)
at May 2, 2005 02:21 PM
Also, it doesn't appear that comments are displaying in the comment view template? I see that my last comment posted (comment count on your main page is 1), but I don't see it displayed here.
Blogbarter to the rescue!
Posted by: Ariel at May 2, 2005 02:22 PM
um...umm no i just had her fix my mt blacklist, which is working pretty well. but i'll look into it.
and again, weird on the comment display...i can see the comments.
Posted by: heidi wright at May 2, 2005 02:41 PM
Welcome Back!
Posted by: Rex at May 3, 2005 06:57 PM
Working now! I highly recommend SpamLookup, btw. It's even better than MT-blacklist!
Posted by: Ariel at May 4, 2005 12:45 PM
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