Hi -

Like everyone else I'm getting overwhelmed by comment spam. For now, I'm opting for the imperfect solution of IP Banning...

Right now I'm getting hit by "Preteen" at 209.210.176.21. The drag is I've already added this address to my list of banned IPs - why is it still getting through?

Thanks for your help!

Cindy

Are you sure he's using the identical IP each time, and not some variation? You could try a partial ban by just adding 209.210. to your list.

Another thought I just had - if he's spoofing the IP address, that might be part of the problem.

Hi!

They were identical - first set on the 10th:
IP Address: 209.210.176.21
Name: Lolita

Added the IP to the banned list.

The received another set today:
IP Address: 209.210.176.21
Name: Preteen

But I'm sure it's spoofed - making any type of banning potentially useless of course. But still - shouldn't MT be blocking mails based on the spoofed addresses that I enter? Or does the process of spoofing fool the system?

cb

Well, I don't know much at all about how to spoof an IP address.

But assuming MT somehow sees the real IP instead of the spoofed one, then it wouldn't know to ban it.

On the other hand, if it sees the real IP, you'd think that would be the one passed along in the comment email.

And I know others have successfully blocked this guy with htaccess, so I'm stumped as to why the IP Banning in MT wouldn't work.

Ah yes, "Lolita"...

I've expanded on the scheme suggested in this thread in the article How to Set a Spider Trap on my site.

Basically, change the name of your mt-comments.cgi and mt-tb.cgi scripts to something else, update your mt.cfg to include:
CommentScript new-comment-script.cgi
TrackbackScript new-trackback-script.cgi

And then implement the spider trap.

Any script that just looks for mt-tb and mt-comments will fail on a 404 error, and any one that crawls the site and doesn't obey robots.txt gets auto-banned at the webserver layer by falling into the trap.

Like many, I was getting hit pretty hard by Lolita and Preteen (same spammer) over the weekend - approximately 50 comments over two days. This person spammed so many times on Saturday that my comments database may be corrupted. I'm now getting that ("Can't use an undefined value as a SCALAR reference at lib/MT/ObjectDriver/DBM.pm line 373") error when clicking on "Manage Weblog" on the menu screen. I am at a loss as to how to repair the problem.

Probable cause of error: At least three of the spam comments didn't fill out correctly, leaving undeletable, empty comments that caused errors when doing blog rebuilds.

After multiple attempts to delete the empty comments and several failed rebuilds, I eventually had to delete the blog entries these 3 comments were attached to and then re-posted the entries at their original date/time via cut and paste. However, I am still getting the error when selecting "Manage Weblog." Of course, I am still able to access all areas of my weblog with the exception of that particular screen. I simply click on "New Entry" and use the buttons on the left.

Any ideas on how to deal with this error?

I'd like to avoid deleting and reimporting my weblog if at all possible. I'm afraid that may be my only option though. Has anyone in this forum successfully recovered from a similar error?

Once a BerkeleyDB database is corrupted, there's not much you can do but dump it and rebuild. If you have access to the command line on your site, you can attempt a db_dump and db_load. If not, I hope you've done an export of your blog recently, 'cause you're going to need to delete your entry and comment databases and re-import.

Consider switching to mySQL if you have it available through your host. At least there, you have a good chance of recovering by using the Repair Table command.