The One About Comment Spammers Striking Back

So remember my maniacal cackling about comment spammers and how I was defeating them? Well, that particular post got some spam too… so, I had to up the ante… Here’s what I did (still desparately clinging to the idea that MT Blacklist is a bad idea):

This one is a bit more complicated, but still not totally beyond the abilities of non-nerds…

Edit the following MT templates:

Individual entry archive template
Comment Listing Template
Comment Preview Template
Comment Error Page

adding the following field, on the line before the < /form > tag:

< input type=”hidden” name=”snoop” value=”goaway” / >

NOTE: Make sure to take out the extra spaces after “<” and before “>”

You can change both the *name* and the *value* code above just remember the *name* you used because you’ll need it later.

For example, using the following code would not only make you feel better, but would work just as well:

< input type=”hidden” name=”fuckyou” value=”cocksucker” />

Next, open your mt-comments.cgi (or mt-comments.pl) file and add the following code just after the �use strict;� line (if you don’t know how to do this, let me know and I can walk you through the process):

use CGI qw(:standard);

if ($ENV{‘REQUEST_METHOD’} eq “POST”) {

my $data = param(‘snoop’);

die unless ($data);
}

If you do this, it essentially stops the most basic spam bots from auto posting using your standard MT-COMMENTS.CGI or MT-COMMENTS.PL files.