A Reporter's Life


Blog bots win

The spamming blog bots have won. I've gotten 85 spam replies on my weblog today, and the day isn't even over. Not only are they annoying, but I have to MANUALLY DELETE EVERY GOD-DAMNED SPAM. In case you're wondering, deleting 85 of them will probably take a good 15 minutes of steady clicking and waiting for the program to update. I've come to hate Movable Type because of things like that.

That stupid blacklist program wouldn't work and I can't make heads or tails out of Thomas's suggestion (especially when I looked at his page and couldn't see how he'd made any changes). Travholt's suggestion is a couple years old and apparently meant for an older version of Movable Type, David's suggestion would require paying for the latest version of Movable type, and my mom's suggestion made no sense to me and is meant for some other program.

So, unless I find some other way of fixing it, I'm going to run a full back-up and delete my blog. I only post stupid crap and my main page hasn't been updated since May, so why the hell do I have a blog, anyway?

Posted by Layla at 6:45 PM, November 21, 2004

— Comments —



If you installed MT in the same place I did, you'll find that there's a MT directory in your cgi-bin. In that, there's a directory called "App". In there, there's a file called "comments.pm". On or about line 25, there's the following:

if ($q->param('post')) {
$q->param('__mode', 'post');

Change that to

if ($q->param('elly')) {
$q->param('__mode', 'post');

---

Next, go to your web interface. Click on the templates button. Go to the "Miscellaneous Templates" section and edit the three comment templates. Just before the close comment tag, there's an input tag that reads

[input style="font-weight: bold;" type="submit" name="post" value=" Post " /]

Chang that to read

[input style="font-weight: bold;" type="submit" name="elly" value=" Post " /]

Do that to all three; rebuild the site.

Now your post button is named "elly" instead of "post".

Breaking it down to non-programming lingo:

These spambots send stuff to your MT scripts. One of these things tells MT that "something called 'post' just sent ' Post '". Because the current MT script looks for that, it thinks that the rest of the stuff is a valid post and adds whatever else they sent. Now with the "elly" button, what happens is the spambot sends the junk and MT gets a notice: "something called 'post' just sent ' Post '". However, because of the change we did to comments.pm, MT will just ignore that because it's really looking for someone to say "something called 'elly' just sent ' Post '". Because the spambots keep sending "post" instead of "elly", MT doesn't know what to do with them, so it ignores them.

Posted by: Thomas at 9:27 PM, November 21, 2004

Where it says "Just before the close comment tag, there's an input tag that reads", that should read "Just before the close form tag, there's an input tag that reads".

And in those tags, the value is "%nbsp;Post%nbsp;" with ampersands instead of percent signs -- that code is "non-breaking space" and was translated as such when I posted the above.

Posted by: Thomas at 9:30 PM, November 21, 2004

Hope Thomas suggestion works, and please make sure you get some sleep *before* making any final decisions on the future of your blog.
Although I am speaking as someone who deleted her own blog feedback for the same reason.
But you may recall the grandma's and my famous last words: Do as I say, not as I do.
Hmmm...

Posted by: Mom at 11:55 PM, November 25, 2004

I would suggest, until the spam is controlled, you just disable the feedback section on your blog. I still like reading what you have to say and this way you're not pulling the plug on that.

Then, when you've worked out the spam stuff, turn the commenting back on so you can hear our witty remarks.

Posted by: David at 11:01 PM, November 27, 2004

"...why the hell do I have a blog, anyway?"

Because your life as a reporter is quite interesting, and a lot of things do not or cannot make it into the articles you write.

That's why.

Posted by: Thomas at 7:43 AM, December 01, 2004

I found some interesting about subj, look at it. www.eddiereva.com

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The liberty of the individual must be thus far limited; he must not make himself a nuisance to other people. by online poker

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