I installed the captcha plugin and spent about an hour to get it to work. The instructions only mention editing comments.pm but if you have installed blacklist then you need to edit mt/extlib/jayallen/MTBlPost.pm instead and make sure you edit the write section (he has two subroutines depending on which version of MT you are running). Hopefully this will reduce the amount of spam submitted on this site as I really don’t want to spent an hour a day removing the comments and deleting the email on my machine(s)

Has anyone else been hit with loads of spam comments on their site? Despite throttling of comment submissions AND the blacklist in the past couple of days i’ve had 25+ comments hit per day with about 100 in the latest attack. Most of the pages are either bestiality or incest related so have now been banned but its a right pain.
Update Another 300+ spam comments got in. I’m sure that a lot of them should have been picked up by mtblacklist though as they either contained words on the list or should have been triggered by spam. Something is seriously wrong.

I received a uk lotto notification that I had won 2.5million dollars in an email this morning. Quite why a UK Lotto would pay out in dollars and send notifications to europe,america and Africa I don’t know. However they did make the mistake of including a UK contact address in London and a uk based phone number (mobile). I’ve therefore bothered to actually pass this information onto the police as they might just have been dumb enough to give correct contact information.

We had a package addressed to our marketing manager. On the front cover of the label was a label saying “contains delicate medical material – ViagraLolly”. This caused much amusement in the office as you can imagine. Inside was the Viagra Lolly – an effective cure for idea impotence. Although its a spoof item to help your “creative juices flowing” in the wrong companys hands (ie ours) this could cause major problems with a lot of mickey taking and embaressment for the recipient.

For the past couple of weeks I’ve been getting very strange spam with contents such as $B:#F|$O$J8$K$J$C$F$O$$$?$@ which is really weird. I just tried adding the first 20 or so characters of the email into the web front end to MT and it totally mucked up my keyboard, so I guess its some form of an ANSI keyboard remap or something? All I can think of its some sort of japanese spam (as a lot of the emails are .jp address’s)
Anyone else seen this?

There’s been a new version of Popfile released which has some pretty major enhancements. Make sure you read the documentation before installing. I’ll be doing that in the next few days I hope.

I was suprised to hear my computer making some noise when checking some links from a blog and discovered the culprit was about.com which is using java ad’s in the browser. Identical in the way to flash ads, but using java. Seeing as though I have the click to view plugin, I don’t see the flash ad’s but I saw heard this one. I really hope this is not the start of a new trend.

Yahoo have now introduced a spam filter to their newsgroups. The daft thing is that not only is it having loads of false positives, it actually still sends you the email, but includes the spam email as an attachment. The only way this really helps is that it stops you accidentally opening spam messages containing web bugs to verify your email address. It also puts [spam] at the front of the subject (and an x-header line) so that you could put a filter on it. However with no way to whitelist or blacklist senders or any obvious means of training the spam engine its going to be more hassle than its worth.

For some reason outlook 2003 decided that the email from one of our servers sent after the backup completed successfully was spam. The email is practically identical to the one it sends every other night, but last nights one was spam weirdly enough!

Blocked the ip address 62.213.67.122 from this site this evening after checking my MT logs. Several times today it’s been used to try and spam this site, but the blacklister got them first 🙂 Its a site in Russia so I doubt they’ve got real concerns looking at this site.