Other than being a royal pain in the kiester, what is the purpose of these damned gibberish spam attacks. I've removed a bunch over the last week and they are seemingly more prolific than sites for fake watches and cialis. Sheesh....
Cometh Minx, O' Pixy Misa, bring thy blessings to we bloggers that are famous and not so famous, shower us with security on the web and make us grateful to all the wonders of a true master of coding. Amen!
Posted by GM Roper at July 10, 2007 12:29 PM | TrackBackOne idea: Diana Hsieh has a little verification thing on her blog where users have to perform simple arithmetic to prove that they're not a bot. She said that it works well.
I don't know how hard it would be to implement, but you can see it here: http://www.dianahsieh.com/cgi-bin/blog/view.pl?entry=7109196450729375197
Posted by Flibbert at July 10, 2007 12:58 PMIt's also pointless adding the gibberish urls to the blacklist, since spammers don't have to use the same one twice, but folks are doing it anyway--I just deleted over 150 bits of that clutter (and google.com again!). I wish munuvians would realize that they can despam without adding all that worthless junk to the list!
Posted by Susie at July 10, 2007 01:40 PMThe solution is to move to Minx; it's not bulletproof, but I coded up a special filter just for those gibberish spams.
I'm testing the import feature right now - as in, it's running this very second. I'm torturing it a bit - I'm loading up Ace's blog, with 13,000 posts and 500,000 comments, but if it works on that it will work on anything.
Still have a few rough edges to file off, but I'm hoping to put it in place today, after which the great migration can begin. 
I was coming to make my own entry after wading through the flood of GVOUVFJR*)G()RMVPIRF)(URG comments last night. I like Flibbert's idea, or some other type of Turing test, whereing people have to type in the letters and numbers that they see before a comment will get posted. However, I don't like adding the extra burden on Pixy (All hail!) because of the righteous home he's given us all on MuNu. However, I was wondering if there was something 3rd party that I could easily install. And I mean easily: I'm CSS impaired. I can wade through it okay, but it's mostly trial an error.
Posted by physics geek at July 10, 2007 07:34 PMI don't know if this is something others would consider - but I close comments on any post over 7 days old. This has kept my comment spam to almost nothing. When everyone else is getting what seems like hundreds - I get about 3 or 4. I figure anyone who really wants to comment on an older post can always email. Then again I don't get many comments - unlike lots of munuvians... so YMMV.
Posted by Teresa at July 11, 2007 03:38 AM