Just a discovery this week. Putting the following setting inside the Apache configuration (virtual host or .htaccess) seems to have positive effect on combating Movable Type comment spams.
SetEnvIf User-Agent libwww-perl NOPOST
<Limit POST>
Order Allow,Deny
Allow from all
Deny from env=NOPOST
</Limit>
It seems that many spam bots are written in Perl, so here I simply reject their POST request if the user-agent matches. It is also easy to extend if there are variants. From the Apache log it rejects about 10 requests over the last 24 hours. Not bad I guess.
It does not work against the trolls though. I got 6 comments today on this site, with nothing but a swearing word starts with ‘F’. Should have block it from WordPress…
And yes, I am still here! Too many things to do over the last couple of days. Actually it was worse – got this mental block that I can’t find any interesting thing to blog. Expect it to continue for another few days…