For the past week, I’ve been getting more comment and trackback spam than ever, so this weekend one of my projects was to do what I can to slow down the spammers. I started out with the Six Apart Guide to Combatting Comment Spam, and the Movable Type manual. (The guide is a bit behind the times so you have to refer to the manual as well.) In my first round of addressing the comment spam issue, I’m trying to take measures that won’t affect users. The first step is renaming the trackback and comment scripts. I doubt it will help but it certainly won’t hurt anything. I also discovered that I wasn’t using the SpamLookup features built into Movable Type 3.2 very well. There are ways to block keywords, ways to subscribe to IP and domain name blacklists, and you can configure how the link filter works as well. Hopefully these filters can be configured to take care of my problems. I’m starting out by adding nicknames used by some of the most persistent comment spammers. Hopefully it filters on nicknames as well as comment content. There are a few things I’m still trying to figure out: * Is there a good list somewhere of other blacklists you can subscribe to? * Is there an easy way to ban an IP address? * Is there a Bayesian filter for Movable Type that works like the one in Thunderbird? I’m also tempted to start looking at writing Movable Type plugins. BigPAPI is built into Movable Type 3.3, and there are some cool things you could do to make spam handling easier.