[geeklog-devel] Negative side effect of comment spam filtering

[Dirk Haun]

Hmm,

there's a story on Slashdot on how comment spam is causing increased
server load on sites running Movable Type (the guys we're borrowing the
blacklist for the SpamX plugin from).

In this post:
<http://www.movabletype.org/news/2004/12/comment_spam_load_issue.shtml>
the blacklist maintainer writes:

|In fact, we have found that there is a fairly major bug (in terms of
|effect, but not code size) which causes page rebuilding even in the case
|of a comment submission which would be moderated and hence should have no
|effect on the live page. This means that even if you are using comment
|moderation in Movable Type and even force moderation in MT-Blacklist,
|your server load is impacted just as if a comment had been posted to the
|live site. This bug has been fixed in development.

Now, when filtering out a comment as spam, Geeklog throws the poster back
to the site's front page. In other words, I guess this could happen to
us, too, if the spammers would really start attacking a Geeklog site.

Sounds like it would be better if Geeklog just died, only displaying the
"spam detected" message (and maybe a link back to the index page, if we
want to be really nice).

Comments?

bye, Dirk


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