November 10, 2004
Auto-blocking open proxies' access to Movable Type

In the category of sheer genius contributions to the fight against spam, let me point you in the direction of Brad Choate's newest plugin for the Movable Type content management system: mt-dsbl

mt-dsbl will look up a commenter's IP address to see if it's on a list of known open proxies (mostly used by email spammers, but recently by blog comment-spammers as well). If matched, the poster will not be able to post comments.

I've seen such a mechanism over at TypePad for a while; cool to see it available for personal blog installations as well. A similar solution for WordPress users can be found here (and even more funky MT Blacklist-like goodness for wordpress here)).

I was a little hesitant to trusting yet another IP address blacklist, but from the DSBL FAQ, it looks like they're relying on authenticated testers etc, so it might be worth a shot. Anything to kill all that comment spam...

(via paulm)

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Comments

Cool, thanks, I just added it to my blog. Hopefully it will help out a lot.

Posted by: eliot on November 11, 2004 03:47 AM

24 hrs later: So far no comments refused based on the IP address filter, while MT Blacklist took a couple of hundred spams overnight. I'll need to find an open proxy to do some testing, methinks.

Posted by: andersja on November 11, 2004 04:40 PM
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