Sound Politics: Back in service

October 31, 2006

Back in service

The blog server has been suffering from comment spam attacks lately, leading to occasional outages, such as most of this morning. Unfortunately, even the comment spam defenses in the current version of Movable Type put a strain on the server. I'm exploring various ways to cope with this.

Thanks for your patience.

Posted by Stefan Sharkansky at October 31, 2006 11:35 AM | Email This

Comments

1. Be of good cheer Stefan:
This means they fear you, and that is often the first part of respect.
ciao for now

Posted by: haze on October 31, 2006 11:40 AM

2. Isn't it amazing how those "tolerant" liberals who oppose your message resort to things like that.

What left-wing fascists.

Posted by: johnny on October 31, 2006 11:50 AM

3. I have no reason to believe that the comment spam is politically motivated. I think it's the usual junk ads for Viagra, porn, diet pills, etc.

Posted by: Stefan Sharkansky on October 31, 2006 11:55 AM

4. SP was hit by a tremor in the "Force". Darth Kerry was on his way to Seattle and that ripple in the Force caused unusual and strange happenings in the electrons used by Sound Politics.

Now that Darth Kerry has vented considerable energy to excuse the inexcusable, the Force has settled down and the electrons are back to normal.

Posted by: SouthernRoots on October 31, 2006 01:26 PM

5. 1. Upgrade to the actual latest version (3.33). Lots of goodies, performance and security enhancements and fixes.
2. Offer TypeKey as an optional authentication method
3. Moderate all comments that are not authenticated

This has the two pronged effect of eliminating comment spam's appearance on the site and the resources it takes. If you want to REALLY reduce it, get the Comment Challenge plugin.

Posted by: Jay Allen on November 1, 2006 06:04 PM