This blog speaks to the problem and the possibility of other blogging sites taking the same line of thinking along with it.

Blogspam == DNS Attack

I'm starting to think blogspam is the equivalent of a DNS attack. Currently, I'm effectively shut down. I cannot blog, because if I post an entry, I cannot allow feedback. My comments, if opened, will be open to predations by hundreds of blog spam comments a day. I don't have time to sort through and delete 300+ comments a day whilst ensuring the real comments stay in and get approved.

Now, this has been going on for the past 2 months. When I turned on MoveableType's comment approval, it significantly helped my cleanup efforts because deleting un-approved comments was much faster than rebuilding the entry they had polluted, and no negative content was posted on the front of my site.

Things got so bad, my web hosting provider, Mediatemple, called my cellphone to inform me my site was consuming a lot of bandwidth because blogspammings were hitting my mt-comments.cgi during their weekely cron-job weekend forays. I've been imitating the admins behavior of renaming the file to mt-comments.cgi.removed when I needed a break, and back again to enable comments.

However, after my 2nd failed attempt to install a Captcha test, the best defense against scripts since scripts can't "see" images, I had to re-install MoveableType since my pryings into Perl foobarred something. I chose to use the MySQL option instead of the Perl flat-file database since I know MySQL a little bit, and was pleased with the enormous speed improvements in site rebuilds. However, users started reporting they couldn't comment. Whatever flag sets how many db connections at one time was being overwhelmed by the blogspam scripts.

Now, if you haven't successfully obtained a single blogspam comment on my site in 3 months, why would you continue? Only 1 reason...

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