molly.com
Sunday 23 May 2004
mt blacklist tips from the master
Well Jay Allen just proved that there are still true gentlemen roaming the earth. Upon reading my rant about comment spam, he rewrote my blacklist to clean up cruft and made several suggestions about my list in comments which I felt would be helpful to move into a more public spot for readers interested in improving their lists, too. Here are Jay’s tips:
- Remove ALL leading periods from domains. By putting them, you are REQUIRING a subdomain, which makes it harder to match obvious spammers.
- Remove all /’s from the end of domains. By including them, you are requiring a slash which makes it harder to match obvious spammers.
- Don’t add a three-part domain to your blacklist when the two-part domain is obviously a spammer. You have a lot of these and you end up just racing the spammer in creating more free subdomains.
- You can use the power of regular expressions far more than I can on the master blacklist. In fact, if you look at my personal blacklist, it’s only got 606 entries on it and I hardly ever get spam.
- Submit your spam to the clearinghouse. While you already got the spam, I can at least add it to the master if I know about it. Plus, I will make sure to add the most effective form of the domain and not #1, #2, or #3 above giving you more protection in the future . . . It’s a nice feedback loop, but only if you use it.
So thanks Jay – this is really helpful information and I appreciate all that you’re doing with mt-blacklist.
Filed under: blogging
Posted by: site admin | 04:38 | Comments (27)
While I don’t condone their intentions, their actions are a demonstration – albeit misguided – of free speech. Such freedom is an all or nothing practice that must be welcomed as openly as it is released.
Bill said:
While I don’t condone their intentions, their actions are a demonstration – albeit misguided – of free speech. Such freedom is an all or nothing practice that must be welcomed as openly as it is released.
Actually, no. This is a misunderstanding that I see repeated all over the Internet. While they’re welcome to their right to Free Speech (assuming both they, the server, the wires the information travels through, and the site owner are American), the site owner is welcome to remove them as they please. A website is private property, in a similar manner to a bar to restaurant being private property. You’re welcome to go there and say whatever you want, but if they owner wishes, he or she can eject and/or ban you.
Please don’t think that, just because you have a right to Free Speech, you automatically waive all responsibilities for what you say.
There is a difference between freedom of speech and vandalism. This site is private property. Spamming comments is no different that writing your words on someone’s garage door in paint. Yes, it can be removed, but it’s time-consuming, and an infringement on Molly’s rights.
Society has become dependent on the phrase “freedom of speech” to rationalize actions that would otherwise be considered illegal or just plain wrong. But using the phrase does not magically make it so. Private property is private property. And Molly has the right to decide what is allowed, and what is not.
Even if you don’t look at it in the light of private property because Molly allows comments, you must look at it as advertising. And these spammers are advertising without paying the ownners of the media they advertise on.
Either way, they’re wrong. If they start sending checks to blog owners they spam amd ask for permission, then I might look at it differently.
One thing you didn’t do that was suggested in the comments to the previous entry: rename mt-comments.cgi to something else. Do it like this:
1. Find /mt/mt-comments.cgi, and rename it to, say, “/mt/mt-spamless-comments.cgi”.
2. Find /mt/mt.cfg and edit it. There’ll be a line about two thirds of the way down thus:
# CommentScript mt-comments.cgi
Change this line to
CommentScript mt-spamless-comments.cgi
Note: you’re removing the “#” comment marker, and changing the name. Previously it was a no-op, so it was using the default. Now it’s not, and it’s using the name you give it.
3. Rebuild the whole blog, and any others that use the same /mt/ subdirectory.
If I haven’t missed anything, this should defeat a lot of the spammers, at least until they think of a way around it. Good luck!
I’m from England so I’m no expert – and no lawyer,, but the 1st Amendment (“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.”) doesn’t actually confer the right of freedom of speech, it actually prevents Congress from creating laws that curtail your freedom of speech.
That’s a completely different thing. Spammers are, in reality, restricting your freedoms as an individual and that is a matter for civil law, I would think.
You now have laws (the CAN SPAM Act, the SPAM Act and the Ban on Deceptive Unsolicited Bulk Electronic mail Act, 2003). They make interesting reading (for a change). We should adopt them in UK.
How to add a black list entry entry to MT?
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