Xblog

First of all, Typo filtering just doesn’t seem to work how I’d expect it to. It may all be user error, as I haven’t looked at the code for it. I’ll look at it more closely in the near future, but for now impression is that it doesn’t work the way it needs to to be effective.

The Akismet support for Typo also seems to be lacking. Enabling it mostly seemed to result in me getting timeouts. I went to look at the Typo site to see how other people were tackling this and discovered… the site was temporarily down. Nice that.

What blows me away is that Typo’s “bulk operations” is still tied to the same synchronous “wait for it to complete or we’ll time out” interface as everything else. What’s clearly called for here is some primitive queuing up of bulk tasks. I’m still learning Rails, but my bet is Rails doesn’t have an easy way to do such a thing (although it seems like it’d be easy to do in Ruby).

Ultimately, I ended up going with the tried and true approach: just blocking port 80 access to IP’s and subnets that were clearly running comment bots. Not an ideal solution if you have a broad audience, but given that I probably have a typical audience of a handful of people, the odds of me accidentally knocking off someone who’d actually read my blog are slim to none. Since I started firewalling off people’s IP’s, the torrent of comment spam that I normally see has diminished to a perfectly manageable level.

So keep that in mind: firewalls are your best frend when it comes to blocking comment spam.