Getting rid of MT comment spam

June 24th, 2004 • 23 comments General, MoveableType

Here’s what I love about spammers, they do the most obvious thing to target the largest audience, so most of the times, I’m excluded!

Here’s the story: Before I redesigned my site, I had a daily meal of 10-15 comment spams. Yes, I did feel recognized, but I didn’t like the “Enlarge Your Penis” kind of crap, I’m in pretty good terms with my penis and the rest of my body.

But after my recent (dare I call it a) redesign, I didn’t get a single comment spam. Not a single one, can you imagine? I didn’t install any of that bayesian spam filters, they’re just too heavy for my site, I didn’t have any extra plugins or tweaks for MoveableType, so how come?

Deeper log reviewing uncovered the mystery. /cgi-bin/mt/mt-comments.cgi had the largest 404 hits among all others. That’s exactly what I’m trying to say, spammers look for obvious things, so they take down the 95% percent of the sites who install MT in such obvious locations. I don’t even have MT in CGI-bin, my installation resides in /mt, a location most spammers don’t think of for some wierd reason.

So here’s a piece of advice for anyone who has MT installed. Move your mt from cgi-bin, or at least rename mt to something else, maybe your pet’s name, or your favorite color, or x78H, your StarWars nickname. Yes, that reduces comment spam if it doesn’t eliminate it.

As for you, spammers, please don’t insult my intelligence. I don’t even care where MT resides as long as it works, so if you start looking for mt-comment.cgi in my new installation location, I’ll move it (or sue somebody), I don’t care where it’s placed, even if it’s deep down somebody’s throat, capiche?!

Do you Gentoo?

June 15th, 2004 • 4 comments Linux

Finally, I got my perfect Gentoo installation. In the last couple of weeks I’ve been installing, formatting, reinstalling Gentoo like crazy, I was so eager to learn the ins’ and out’s of the portage, ebuilds, the utilities, and I must say… I’m very impressed!

Well, why wouldn’t I?! Gentoo is a very stable system, it’s easy to use, straight to the point (well maybe not the installation process, but still), and for the first time, I get a distribution that doesn’t try to shove all it’s applications down my throat, when I want something I can ask for it, I don’t need a system trying to tell me what to do.

I know I had to get through a tiresome installation, I had to redo a lot of work, I had to wait for about 12 hours for XFree, Qt and KDE to complete, but it was totally worth it, trust me, the performance I gained was too good to be true. I’ve tried Fedora Core 2, tried Mandrake 10, SuSE 9, they were all good, but they were nothing compared to a fully tweaked Gentoo system in terms of performance.

What I really like about Gentoo, is that you can actually choose what you like, you don’t have to stick to somebody else’s compilation and choice of packages, directory structure, kernel modules, tons of drivers and hardware auto-detection. With Gentoo, you can ask for whatever kernel you need, you get to choose what’s compiled and what’s not, you tell it whether to use MMX, 3DNow, SSE/SSE2, and all those buzz-word-sounding acronyms, you end up with a system that can only run on your computer, your hardware, your choices, not somebody else’s, you don’t need hardware detection anymore, you compiled all you need and that’s it, let the kernel do it’s stuff.

Most of the installation is very well documented in gentoo’s handbook, but that isn’t enough to get a full-fledged Linux up and running, so I’ll try to be a bit more useful and talk a little about my installation experience, though it wasn’t very pleasant, I finally liked what I saw. This isn’t meant to replace Gentoo’s handbook, I’m not going to repeat what Gentoo guys already documented, in fact, some steps are even omitted.

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Site’s Atom Feeds

June 1st, 2004 • General

Since I updated to MT 2.611, I’ve been learning more and more about Atom. Turns out that my feeds are broken, or at least will be. MT generates <id> tags based on entry ID in the database, which isn’t always a good thing, since these IDs might be unique for a while, but later on you might export, import, change the publishing software, and that would cause a lot of pain to get these IDs back.

Well, Mike Pilgrim has a very good article on generating future-proof Atom IDs. Basically, he crunches the entry date into a large number and uses it for IDs, this should work just fine for single author Atom feeds, since no two entries can be saved at the exact same time.

Now my feeds are fixed, and this should be the last time I change my IDs in Atom feeds, they’re supposed to be unique site-wide! (Thanks Mark)

Note: for those who are interested in how this is done in MT, just replace <id> with this:

<id>tag:yoursitename.com,<$MTEntryDate format=”%Y-%m-%d”>:/archives/<$MTEntryDate utc=”1″ format=”%Y%m%d%H%M%S”$></id>