Recently in Comments and Trackbacks Category

Updated February 9, 2007. Originally posted in 2004 and updated several times since.

Spammers have discovered bloggers and sooner or later if you allow comments or trackback pings on your weblog you will get spammed.

Types of Blog Spam

Blog spam appears in many flavors:

1. Basic comment spam. The spammer leaves a short uneventful message in a comment field in one of your entries. The spam comes from the URL placed in the comments URL field. These URLs link back to every conceivable scam.
2. Comment spam flooding. The spammer uses an automated computer bot to flood your blog with comment spam messages, up to hundreds in an hour. The spammer doesn't necessarily leave a URL, but can leave garbage messages, almost like a graffiti artist. The comment spam can put a severe load on the server hosting your blog software to the point that it crashes.
3. Trackback Spam. Spammers have discovered how to take advantage of Trackback. TrackBack spam is very similar to comment spam. The spammer sends TrackBack pings to your site that direct viewers to a totally unrelated URL.
4. Referral spam. The spammer links to your site from their site, and then pings your site through their link, thus creating a reference and link to their site on the statistics referral log of your website. When you are reviewing your stats and see the reference to an odd site (ex. Paris Hilton), clicking on the link takes you to their site. Many people list "referrals" on their site publicly, so by spamming referral logs, not only does the spammer get a link on your referral log (which is picked up by Google) but may even get a link on your main page.

How can you fight spam on your blog?

By LMT contributor Jesse Gardner of PlasticMind and Movable Tweak. Article double posted at Movable Tweak

I've never liked the idea of a separate comment preview page. Besides being overkill, it often gets missed during upgrades and becomes just another bug to squash.

So after picking up some good ideas from Mike Industries, I decided to toss it to the curb and show our commenters just exactly what their comment will look like as they type.

Trackback spammers have recently been flooding blogs with spam, often with hundreds per day. Although MT's Spam Lookup plugin junks most of the spam, the flood of trackbacks can put a strain on server resources. To take a look at the amount of trackback spam you may be getting, click on "Trackbacks" from your main blog menu, then select "Junk Trackbacks".

Listed here are some defensive measures you can take.

A few weeks ago I got a telephone call from my web host letting me know that "one of your Movable Type CGI scripts is using up half the resources of the server and would you please disable the script before we find it necessary to close your account?" Don't you just love news like that? Fortunately, it all got sorted out within a couple of hours; here's the scoop.

If you've had your MT blog for a while, since before version 3.2, you may have upgraded your MT installation, but didn't bother to make changes to the code in your templates. In the templates for one of the earlier versions of MT, if you use Typekey authentication, the Individual Entry Archive Template calls the comments.cgi script to invoke a javascript file that reads back to the commenter their name. Turns out that every time a page displays that includes a Typekey-authenticated comment, the CGI script will run. One of my sites is fairly high traffic, and starting some time last year I was getting over 25,000 requests to the comments.cgi script each day.

This is the line of code that can bring your server to its knees:

The solution is easy. Really easy.

By LMT contributor Christian Watson of Smiley Cat. Tutorial cross-posted here.

Recently I posted 10 tips to improve the design of your blog's comment section. One of those tips was to make your 'author' comments look different so that your readers could easily see your contribution to the discussion. Here's how to do just that using Movable Type and a dash of CSS.

The key to making the functionality work is staggernation's excellent Compare plugin. This adds some much needed conditional tags that basically enable you to compare one thing to another and do something based on the results.

Updated.

Adding a Recent Comments section to your weblog is easy and straightforward. There are two basic approaches. The first is to list the last N number of recent comments; the second the last N most recently commented on entries.

The Most Recent Comments

In this example of Recent Comments the last 10 comments are listed, regardless of how many times there may have been comments to the same entry. The comment authors names are linked to their respective websites, if they have them, and the entry title is linked to the author's comment in the entry.

For most recent comments like shown in the example to the left, add the following code to the sidebar section of the Main Index Template. There are various customizations you can make to the code. If you want a different number of comments, change the lastn attribute to another number. Setting the "show_email" attribute of the MTCommentAuthorLink tag to zero guarantees that your commenters' email addresses will not be displayed. Alternatively you could set the attribute spam_protect to 1 which would modify the displayed email address to make it more difficult for spam bots to harvest. More modifications are described in the MT manual.

One measure to guard against spam is to close comments on old blog entries. This is easy enough to do.

At the bottom of your Edit Entry window is the pull-down for none, open, or closed comments. If you don't see this as pictured, click on "Customize the display of this page" link, select "Custom" and select the fields you wish displayed, including "Allow Comments".

Updated February 21, 2007

TrackBack is a feature of Movable Type (and Typepad) that allows you to let other sites know that you have linked to them, and lets you know when other sites have linked to you.

If enabled, the TrackBack feature will place a direct link on your Movable Type entry to entries from other sites that are linking to your entry. Conversely, if you place a link on your weblog entry that links to another site's entry, a link to your site will show up on the other site's entry.