So when I took over our university’s Movable Type server two weeks ago, I knew that I would be in for a few surprises. Some of them good—I now know more about using the command line than I ever thought possible, which is odd because I consider myself much more of a visual person than a “code person.”
Case in point, one of the first things that I did when I took over the server was give it a bit of branding, including a spiffy new Princeton shield-inspired logo, which one can see on the new portal for the revamped service.
Some of the surprises were not so good—a public server is not really something that one can neglect for very long; evil, nasty, scum-sucking people will exploit it. After upgrading our primary Movable Type installation, which currently hosts over 200 blogs, I had to clean out a couple thousand spam comments and TrackBacks. I thought that was a large number. Silly, Michael.
Oh, no. It seems there was a legacy Movable Type 2.6 installation on the server with no active spam filters whatsoever. Thirty-one blogs on that installation—over eighty-three thousand spam messages. I would love to just wipe them all out with a click of a single button, but that wouldn’t be right.
Mixed in with the comments about penis enlargements, incest pics, horse ejaculation(?), and texas hold-em sites are some really interesting discussions that arose from a Writing Center class last fall. These students all had to keep a dream journal, and all of the students actively commented on the other students’ posts about their dreams. It was a wonderful idea that produced fascinating results.
So I upgraded the 2.6 installation to MT 3.2 to curb the constant flood of new spam and to give me system-wide control over the comments. With a few key search terms (sex-related, gambling-related, etc.), I started to chip away. After about 7 hours of work, there are now less than 30,000 spam comments left. Die, spammers, die!
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