Dear folks,
James Bow here. Barring a small number of cosmetic changes that Northstar wants me to make (this weekend), the renovations for the People’s Republic of Seabrook is, by and large, complete. I’ve just put in the changes for the monthly and category archives.
Chief among the changes is the elimination of comment spam, and that’s the reason why I’m posting (assuming Northstar doesn’t mind). It might be instructive to note that, when I first logged into TPRS, Northstar had 55,000 comments to his name. After going through and eliminating the comment spam (taking an hour or two here and there whenever I wanted to tackle a fairly mundane task) leaves Northstar with just 6,832 comments. That’s right: over 48,000 comments, or 87% of the comments on TPRS were spam.
Most of the spam was deposited after March 1, 2004. A lot of it was easy to take out in large bunches, as many spams all had the same name (“Viagra” was quite common, “texas holdem” was also common) or the same IP address. On occasion, I went into a particularly infested post and cleaned things out from there. The most frustrating spams were done by those who had managed to alter both the name and the IP address at will. They were unquestionably the same spammer and the same spam, but eliminating them was lot more time consuming.
Also, since installing MTBlacklist onto TPRS, the plugin has stopped 5,648 spam comments and moderated another 2,404 more. This is clearly over and above the comments that were blocked after we installed [MTCloseComments], which now shuts down all posts that are 21 days old and older.
So, you MovableType bloggers who wish to stop the scourage of comment spam should seriously consider installing these two plugins. If, together, they can keep the TPRS clean, they can certainly keep your site clean.
Now enjoy the new digs of the People’s Republic of Seabrook.
