if i only knew...

Comment spamming here and everywhere

It looks like my blog broke through some kind of a popularity or at least visibility threshold in the blogosphere: spammers now think it's a good enough website to advertise their junk on.

Last weekend i got about 20 spam comments on this blog, and while deleting them one by one, i realized that some earlier comments that i didn't check the URLs for were also spam. When reading about blog spam i always thought of people putting usual email spam "content" in the comments so that they are very easy to recognize and delete. I never imagined that spammers are actually making sort of relevant comments on the entries and use the URL field only for their spam URL to get better search engine ranking. Amazing how far these suckers go... Out of the 20 spam comments only one was very obviously p o r n related spam, all the others were spam URLs disguised as regular friendly comments.

Anyway, i was looking for a solution to the problem, here are two links i found useful:
Movable Type gurus' post about comment spam and possible solution on Six Log
mt-blacklist is a new MT plugin that uses a blacklist of frequent spam URLs to filter comments before they are posted. I will install it today.

Update 10/20:
I installed MT-blacklist, hopefully it will help. I also found a very very VERY helpful thread in the MT support forums with lots of good ideas to prevent blog and guestbook spamming.
Also take a look at Junkeater.com, nice spam prevention service for free. I will be implementing this as well on my sites soon.