It’s time to make the bad man stop.

I promised a script to make it easy to close comments in Movable Type 2.x a few days ago, and I’ve finally found a few minutes to finish it off. It’s written in PHP and it’s available right here. My working installation is here (but you need the login and pass to use it). It’s still in beta phase. Here are the requirements for use:

• You don’t hold me responsible if something horribly bad happens
• You’re using Movable Type 2.x. (I don’t yet know if this works with MT 3.x. Anyone wanna take a look? It should be easy to make it work unless they changed the database structure a lot.)
• You’re using a MySQL database (version 4.x?) on the back end (Movable Type supports other kinds too, but MySQL is probably the most popular database for MT).
• You know the login and password to your MySQL database. Note: This is not necessarily your MT login. This is the login and pass used to access your MySQL database directly. If you’re not in charge of your database, you may need to ask your database admin to run this for you.
• You must put this script on the server that hosts the database it will be run against. (Translated into Geekish: this script assumes you want to use “localhost”).

I’ve already used the script on this blog, and it worked flawlessly. It’s ridiculous how easy it is to use. Just go through the script, and rebuild your blog. Done. The whole process takes far less than a minute.

This script asks you to select which database you want to query if you have multiple databases in your MySQL installation. It also asks you which blogs you want to affect if you have multiple blogs. I would love it if a few geeks out there with knowledge of PHP and MySQL could help me test this thing out. Just comment out line #130 (at least in the script’s current iteration) and the script won’t do a thing to your database, so it’ll be safe to test. It’s well-commented, so you should be able to follow it. I especially need someone to test this that has multiple databases in their installation of MySQL, and has different MT installations in each database. I don’t have the setup to test that scenario.

I look forward to hearing your feedback! Tell your friends about this (after you’ve seen a few success messages aside from mine, of course) if you think it might be useful to them.

I’m not sure if this means that the spammers win or that I win, but I’ve made a couple decisions about how I’m going to fight comment spam. I’m changing a few policies for a couple reasons.

First, my auto-block count has reached 13,000 blocks. There’s no question that MT-Blacklist has saved me hours of work, and saved my blog from falling into some horrible, decrepit state where my readers would be foced to wade neck-deep through ads for refinanced morgages, cheap medication, and porn just to read each others’ comments. I would sooner shut down my blog than allow that to happen.

The second reason is due to something I never anticipated until the first time it happened. My apologies for the lengthy explanation, but I figure some of you may find this interesting. Even though I am successfully blocking thousands of attempts to spam my blog and the sub-blogs on this site, I cannot keep the spammers’ scripts from using the CPU power of my server. Each time a spammer’s script attempts a posting, the server has to think for a second before it can tell them that they cannot post their URLs, because it has to check the URL they’re trying to post against my blacklist, and determine if it should allow them to make their post. And when the spammer attempts to post 750 comments (or over 3000 comments as happened recently) my server becomes quite busy just blocking them.

The guys who run my server don’t like the fact that my site can take CPU power away from the other sites hosted on their machine, so they have to either shut down comments (which they did the first time), or install some kind of software governor that slows down the CPU usage for just my site, so that the other sites on the server aren’t inconvenienced by the spam attacks I get. That’s what they’ve done for the most recent attacks. So now, when an attack happens, no one can read my site until the CPU usage goes back down to normal levels. Visitors even see a page that says something like, “Resource limit exceeded. Will refresh in a few seconds…”. Some of you may have seen that recently. That’s what you see when I’m in the middle of a Spam Storm.

Obviously I don’t like the idea that spammers can temporarily deny my readers access to my content, so I’ve decided to close the comments for any entry that has been up for a few months. But as usual, I want to fight this war on a larger scale. Closing comments on old entries by going through each entry and clicking “Close” and “Save” can take hours of work (at least the first time through). I want to help people do that by providing a free PHP script (at least for Movable Type 2.x users, but possibly 3.x users as well) that can automatically close old posts whenever it is run. So any time you want to close the comments on any posts that are older than X days, you just run the script, tell it how many days to leave open, and it does the rest for you in about 1 second. Probably less than 1 second, but you get the idea. A quick rebuild of your blog will finish up the work.

I’d like to use this blog post to gauge interest in such a script. Assuming it was easy to use, would you find such a thing useful, or not? If not, why not?

Do you find it entertaining to hear old news reports where people speak of old technologies as though they were totally new and unheard of (because at the time, they were)? Well, if so, you’ve gotta hear A network called ‘Internet’ (with my apologies for forcing you to use Windows Media). I love how they say “Internet” instead of “the Internet” as though it’s a proper name. That’s sweet.

My favorite quote: “There’s not a lot of cursing or swearing [on Internet.]” As you can tell, this is early in “Internet’s” development.

I know I’ve touted my hatred for comment spam in the past, and I’ve gone so far as to taunt the spammers by putting a live count of blocked spam at the bottom of the main page on this site. After I update my archive pages, it’ll be on every page. That number is probably one of the main things that makes me look at my own page. I already know how the entries are going to look, but I like to see how many spam attempts I’ve blocked on this blog. I should mention that number doesn’t include the blocks done on the handful of sub-blogs on this site. It would be over 16,000 if it did.

Well, the number went up by a couple thousand blocks in the last day. The good people over at home.ro have hit me over 2300 times in the last 24 hours. And not one of their attempts got through. I just thought I’d publicize that.

Bring it, fools. 🙂

After making some generally-disparaging remarks about cars in general (and my car more specifically) the other day, I laid out what I was looking for in my mode of transportation. I wanted something that follows my schedule rather than vice-versa, and something that didn’t make me sweat while using it. The only things that do that currently are cars (taxis included, I guess, but they’re way too expensive), and motorized bikes/mopeds/etc. Trains, monorails, and buses are on their own schedule, not mine.

Today I discovered an interesting idea called SkyWeb Express. Is this the answer I’m looking for? It seems to be better than other forms of public transportation in certain ways What do you all think?

Wheeee!

My comments are (hopefully temporarily) down right now. This server got hit really hard by a spamming bot this morning, and the spammer posted over 750 spam comments in a very short amount of time. I’m happy to say they’ve all been removed from all the blogs on my server, but the bot caused so much activity that my hosting provider’s “watchdogs” shut down my comments because the comment module was overloading the servers. 🙂

I’m negotiating with them now to see if they’ll let me have comments back. Until then, please ignore the “Server Error” blah blah you see when you try to view and post comments.