Random FYI on MHS

[seventhe]

Hey MHS-ers -

So the spambots have finally found the old MHS blog and are currently overloading my website with false hits and an obscene amount of comment-spam. (check it out. it's ridiculous.) So, over the next couple weeks I'll be archiving all of our old writings and then uninstalling the MHS blog.

I know, it's sad! But I'll save all the writing (although the comments will probably be lost) and keep it elsewhere on SevNet in a new spambot-free archive. It'll take me a while to do, but it won't be that hard, just time-consuming (and I am sparse on time what with my band and all).

Just an FYI - if anyone has other ideas, let me know. Or, drakon, if you want to mirror the writings on SEC.net, maybe that's not a bad idea either...

Comments

[fireholly.livejournal.com]

'Serwis motoryzacyjny, nowos'ci, opisy i zdje;cia, porady, katalog samochodo'w, autokomis. Pierwszy polski serwis SMS - bramka sms. Setki foro'w dyskusyjnych, tysia;ce dyskutanto'w, miliony odwiedzin.'

I just read that out loud and a big thunderbolt sounded outside and there's this weird winged thing which says it's the Great Summon Diablos here to aid me and demands to know how many enemies to destroy.

Help.

[cruithne-mk2.livejournal.com]

Fly sent me over. I appear to be her pet tech-support meister.

We recently had a similar attack happen on our wiki, and the best we were able to do was ban posting by anonymous IPs and remove the offending spam.

So I prodded the site, and I'd like to know a few things:

1)What software do you use for the site, in particular that blog?
2)Can you get the IP adresses of posters?
3)If possible, can you change the text of your guestbook script?
(As an example, UseMod, the code we use for our wiki, says "Edit the text of this page", which many spambots use as a search parameter. We changed it to "Modify the text of this page", cutting down on spam quite a bit.

[nashidesei.livejournal.com]

Dude. Whut tha feck. I'm afraid to read a couple of those outloud. *looks at Fly's comment in concern*

[first-seventhe.livejournal.com]

Send it after the spambots.

Also, I wonder which of the words in that sentence translate into "free porn click here".

[first-seventhe.livejournal.com]

YAY AND THANKS.

1) The MHS site runs on Moveable Type, but an older version (it was installed on SevNet a year or two ago).
2) Yes, I can, and there is an "IP Banning" option. The problem is that the spambots are smart and cycle through IP addresses, so banning each and every one would (a) take centuries and (b) not work cause they'd just get new ones, I assume.
3) I can try editing the comment script; that's not a bad idea.

I had a friend who had the same thing happen to his personal blog run by MT, and he says that the spambots look for certain aspects of the MT code itself and there's nothing much you can do.

*sigh* They're starting to come to my personal blog as well, which is what's driving me over the wall. Thanks for the help -- let me know if you have any suggestions XP

[first-seventhe.livejournal.com]

SRSLY. It would be funny if it weren't so annoying!