Because of a comment I received asking if the Spam Stopgap Extreme plugin for WordPress would work in MT, I went searching for the answer and came across an interesting commentary on the plight of MT users and comment spam. This post, MT Plus Comment Spam Equals Dead Site, by Reid Stott over at The Daily Whim outlines the comment spam issue in general and more specifically in regards to Movable Type. Stott uses MT and appears to have done his research before posting his conclusions. This commentary isn’t so much about the validity of MT as it is about the actual cost of comment spam. It’s something I had not given any though to. I had only seen comment spam as an annoyance or irritation when I had to spend time removing it. I was (still am) more curious as to why anyone would bother flooding blogs with comment spam than any irritation it has caused. I never thought of the CPU load on servers that have been brought to a screeching halt by comment spammers flooding them with hundreds of hits in 10 seconds or less. Multiply that by how many MT users are on one server and it gives you an idea if why some Web hosting providers have opted to not allow MT on their servers.

MT is not the only blogging script that has been targeted by comment spammers. b2 and now WordPress have become a target for comment spammers. The only difference between MT and WP is that the WP community jumps to the occasion and builds a better tool to fight comment spam, some being better than others. That and the fact that WP is written in PHP, while MT is written in Perl. I’m not putting Perl down, the two are just different. Not being a programmer, I don’t want to traverse the debate on which is better. I like PHP because I can manipulate it to do what I want it to do with less effort than I was able to do with Perl. I’m just a hacker, not a programmer and yes, there is a difference.

Anyway, check out the commentary, it’s informative, well thought out and being updated as more information becomes available.

As a side note: I haven’t gotten one single spam comment to moderate since I implemented The Spam Stopgap Extreme plugin. Will the spammers find a way to get past it? Maybe, it would not surprise me. I’ll post here should they get past this plugin.

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