This plugin is for blocking feedback[ct(=comment) and tb(=trackback)] spams by adding an additional CCode(hidden ct input field) or adding TCode to original tb ID in tb URL, and then obfuscating that Code for the purpose of not easily guessing it.

MT 3.2's enforced anti-spam system is performed mainly after getting feedbacks. So if many spams are arrived, then it also uses system/MT user resourses when filtering, junking, unpublishing, and deleting spams although it becomes comparatively easy than pre 3.2.

CCode and TCode works in before saving spam feedbacks to MT system. CCode/TCode make it very difficult for spam-bots to guess tb URL and required ct input...

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Update April 9, 2005: Brad Choate has released a new anti-spam plugin called SpamLookup. Jay Allen, the creator of MT-Blacklist recommends SpamLookup over MT-Blacklist.

Spammers have discovered Trackback and have recently been leaving their trail of unwelcome links all over the blogosphere. To get a sense of what we are up against, read The Register's interview with a link spammer. Listed here are some defensive measures you can take.

MT-Blacklist

As with comment spam, your first recourse is Jay Allen's MT-Blacklist. The blacklist will help you delete the trackbacks and ban the URLs the spammers leave. Note that if you are using MT2.661 and MT-Blacklist 1.65, Jay has special instructions for deleting trackback spam pings....

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Updated April 30, 2005

TrackBack is a feature of Movable Type (and Typepad) that allows you to let other sites know that you have linked to them, and lets you know when other sites have linked to you.

If enabled, the TrackBack feature will place a direct link on your Movable Type entry to entries from other sites that are linking to your entry. Conversely, if you place a link on your weblog entry that links to another site's entry, a link to your site will show up on the other site's entry.

Here an example of TrackBack in action. In this entry you can see that 7 other weblogs are referencing this entry.

Clicking on the TrackBack link will show the list of other sites or weblogs...

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Updated August 29, 2005. Originally posted in 2004.

Spammers have discovered bloggers and sooner or later if you allow comments or trackback pings on your weblog you will get spammed.

Blog spam appears in many flavors:

1) Basic comment spam. The spammer leaves a short uneventful message in a comment field in one of your entries. The spam comes from the URL placed in the comments URL field. These URLs link back to every conceivable scam. The spammers leave URLs here to create a link from your site to theirs, thus increasing their Google ranking. Spammers are also now linking to legitimate sites that have not cleared their pages of comment spam, thus increasing the Google rank...

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I've been watching my MT-Blacklist log for the past few months, and I've noticed something interesting: I haven't received a single piece of comment spam. It's all been TrackBack ping spam. Are others seeing the same trend?

The really interesting thing is that - according to server logs - the renamed mt-comments.cgi script has been getting hit, hard as ever.

If you found this article useful, please consider supporting this site through a donation.

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Movable Type is the platform that introduced TrackBacks to the web, and now in version 3.2 we've given you the most powerful interface for managing, moderating, and editing TrackBacks that you receive.

TrackBacks are finally equal citizens in the Movable Type platform: Just like comments, they can be directed to go into moderation, and any TrackBack that's been received can be edited. These two features have long been requested by our users, and we're glad to include not just these improvements, but a full suite of TrackBack management options including the new junk folder for spam TrackBacks, and a powerful new user interface for performing bulk actions on TrackBacks including...

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So I'm just not quite sure what to do about trackback spam. I get far more spam than I get legit trackbacks. Even though I installed a filter (of sorts), and even though the filter is working, I still get trackback spam. In the last two weeks or so, I've received 3 valid trackbacks, maybe 5 spam trackbacks and at least 7 trackbacks that were blocked due to being sent from open proxies. I'm not quite to the point of turning it off completely, but the thought is being considered.

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Over the past month or two, comment and Trackback spam has become a bigger issue for everybody. Six Apart even released the Guide to Comment Spam to help Movable Type users combat the problem.

danandsherree.com hasn't been left out of the spam attacks. Today alone, MT-Blacklist has denied over 200 spams! A number of those, unfortunately, have gotten through - and not just today. For the past two weeks this site has gotten hammered daily. I'm getting tired of clicking "De-Spam" buttons.

So I added several Blacklist strings that have really helped. Strings like "poker," "porn," and "xxx," to name just a few. (Many of...

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I've been getting hit all day by a "crap flood" spammer from who is leaving hundreds of nasty spam trackbacks on my various weblogs. This spammer is sure to be hitting other MT weblogs. If you want to preemptively block it from your site, go into your Blacklist settings and block the URL pattern, "pictures-and-videos.com". Make sure you have "Scan incoming TrackBack pings" ticked in your Blacklist Configuration. Have you found the tutorials at Learning Movable Type helpful? Please consider linking to LMT at http://www.learningmovabletype.com/ . Thanks!

Posted by elise on October 30, 2004 to Announcements | Email to a friend | Printer-friendly version ...

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For a lot of bloggers, participating in a community online is what motivates us and keeps us blogging. Good feedback from commenters and people sending TrackBacks can keep a weblog alive and vibrant, but negative comments or, worst of all, the plague of spam, can take all the satisfaction out of maintaining a blog.

Because nothing's more frustrating than spammers or trolls ruining your community, we've tried to make sure you have strong anti-spam tools out of the box in this new version of Movable Type. But eliminating the annoyance of spam is where the new community management features start, not where they end. So, we've made a powerful new Feedback Rating System in Movable Type 3.2....

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This morning I saw a flurry of new information from many sources about this thing called rel="nofollow" which is supposed to help stop comment spamming. Read about it's interaction with Movable Type at Six Log, Movable Type, and the Six Apart Professional Network, and a little more generic info is at Google.

Either I don't fully understand what nofollow is supposed to do, or it really is a dumb idea. I'm confident it's the latter.

Well, ok, those who implement nofollow will definitely help in not raising a spammer's Google PageRank. But that's the only benefit. As has been pointed out, a legitimate commenter's link won't count...

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Hi everyone, my name is Jay Allen and I am the Product Manager for Movable Type. I'm writing today to address - what else? - comment spam.

This is an issue that, as many of you know, I have spent several thousand waking hours working on since its first appearance back in the fall of 2003, both as the author of MT-Blacklist and as the maintainer of the Comment Spam Clearinghouse. This is an issue which Six Apart takes very seriously, as evidenced not only in the improvements in Movable Type v3.x but also, in some part, by my hiring to this position.

Over the last month, we have been devoting a great deal of resources to solving the comment spam problem once and for...

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Movable Type 3.2 features a new take on an old friend: the Junk folder. In your email program, some messages are likely to be spam, and most email applications these days offer a folder that can be set to delete junk after a set period of time.

We've brought the same convenience and power to Movable Type. Using the new feedback scoring system described earlier, comments or TrackBacks that fall below your spam threshold score can be set to be automatically deleted after a configurable period of time. (The default is 14 days.) The best part about the new junk folder? You don't have to touch it. If you just want to accept the default settings and not mess with junk comments or TrackBacks...

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Tutorials in Alphabetical Order

"Email Me" Contact Forms A Safe Way to Upgrade to MT 3.2 Add Your Links Here Adding a Footer Adding a Sidebar - MT3.1 and Earlier Adding a Sidebar to the Default Archive Templates Alphabetize Your Entries Amazon Web Services An Overview of the MT Program File Directories Applying MT3 Style Templates to MT2.X Background Patterns Backing Up Your Blog Banner Images Blog Maintenance Blogger Audioblogging with Movable Type CGIWrap and suEXEC Category Archive Pages Category Customizations Closing Comments Colors - Background, Banner, Headline, and Font Colors - Experimenting With, Using MTSetVar and MTGetVar Combining Multiple Blogs Into One Concerning Spam Converting from Fixed to Fluid Style...

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The fight against comment and TrackBack spam is an ongoing battle, and it's worth reviewing some of the new options available for managing the attacks.

Since our last roundup, which covered many mod_security options as well as the DSBL plugin, some popular new choices have come to the forefront.

Cameron Marlow of Blogdex fame has created MT-Keystrokes, a proof-of-work plugin that requires human input and a javascript interpreter in the commenter's browser.

If you're facing TrackBack attacks, you'll want to enable the DSBL plugin (as well as MT-Blacklist, if you don't already have it) and a nice complement to these functions is MT-Moderate, which enables moderation of TrackBacks....

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This tutorial is written by LMT guest author Neil Turner and is cross-posted on Neil's World.

Since upgrading to Movable Type 3.2 I've dumped Jay Allen's MT-Blacklist and instead made SpamLookup handle comment/trackback spam on its own. The plugin is included by default on MT 3.2, and while it can do a good job as it is, you might like to try some tune-ups to make it more effective. Moderation and Junking

In Movable Type 2.x, comments just had one status - published. Any spam blocking system could only accept or deny comments and trackbacks. In MT 3.0x and 3.1x, comments gained an additional status - ‘moderated'. This was where comments could be held for human...

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SpamLookup is an anti-spam plugin created by Movable Type engineer Brad Choate, which identifies spam based on a number of unique characteristics and administrator based tests. It includes: • IP address blacklist lookups • Domain name blacklist lookups • IP address source correlation • Lookup whitelists • Link limits • Email and Link memory tests • Keyword filtering

This plugin has been updated for Movable Type 3.2 and utilizes the feedback rating framework. Each test that is enabled contributes to the final composite score of a feedback item. The final score after all tests (SpamLookup and other plugins)...

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I've received only a small taste of the trackback spam that has been floating around. Yet it's still enough to be annoying. Especially since I didn't really have any good way of addressing it. With comments, I can moderate them. I can make sure they have approval. Not the case with trackbacks.

Luckily, Jacques has put together a nice little modification of Brad's DSBL plugin. I installed it, though I have yet to receive any messages, so I really have no idea if it works or not. I just thought I'd give it a shot, because it uses a method close to my own heart. Namely, it sits there and does the work so that I don't have to worry about it. At least, that's the idea.

If you have any problems...

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One of Movable Type's biggest strengths is the platform's support for an unlimited number of weblogs. Once you've got a thriving community of bloggers creating entries and publishing their thoughts, though, it quickly becomes necessary to manage the weblogs on your system.

To meet this need, we've introduced an entire new area of functionality in Movable Type 3.2: The System Overview. We've chosen the System Overview as the first feature to highlight in this new release because it represents a single home for administrators. It's one place to go to oversee everything that's happening across your installation, whether that's a single blog for your site, dozens of blogs managing...

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Advanced TrackBack Lookups

When Movable Type (or any other blogging software) sends a TrackBack ping, the server's IP address from which the ping was sent usually matches the IP address of the domain that is listed in the TrackBack URL.

On the other hand, when spammers send TrackBack pings, they tend to spam with many different TrackBack URLs, none of whose domains match the sending IP address.

This test will check the TrackBack ping IP address and the IP address of the domain listed in the URL to see if they match or are at least close, indicating that they might be on an...

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