Although comment spam has been around for a while, it really seemed to have accelerated in the last week or so. The “Lolita” link actually made it to the top five in DayPop’s Top 40 listing.
Getting annoyed by one-too-many spams a couple of weeks ago, I wrote a comment spam hack for my blog that made it possible to block known spam URLs (in a rather labor-intensive way). Luckily Jay Allan came to the rescue and released his MT-Blacklist CGI/plugin that he has been feverishly finishing over the weekend. I got to alpha-test it and it’s a sweet piece of work, if I may say so.
So how big a deal is comment spam, anyway? Jay’s site is listed no less than four times in today’s Top 40. I’m sure that Six Apart’s article didn’t hurt the exposure, but the buzz was there even before.
I had hacked the MT commenting script to avoid duplicate comments, but this modification was easily applied to Jay’s code, as well.
I also modified his Blacklist.pl plugin by commenting out the code to override some MT tags to filter out blacklisted comments. I don’t see the usefulness of this functionality and don’t want to pay the performance penalty. The good news is that he’s going to make this functionality configurable in the next release.