Recovered from the Wayback Machine.
Six Apart has released MT 2.66 specifically because of comment spam.
One change is throttle control, which means if you get hit from the same IP address with several comments in a row, MT will shut down the IP. This wouldn’t have helped with the recent comment blitz because that person used a proxy to vary the IP address with each comment. But it should help with the script kiddies.
The second change is one I, point blank, do not like. What happens is that a redirect is built into the management of comment author’s URL, so you get this silly little redirect page between clicking on the URL and getting to the URL. This supposedly is to stop the redirected URL from getting Google Buzz. However, people who have implemented this have said it doesn’t work. Not to mention that my good commenters no longer get Google goodness.
(And it does nothing about the spam comments that embed 100 different URLs into the comment body. )
I tried this at a site that’s upgraded – it busts the back button. There’s this ugly little redirect page. It’s awful.
Google is self-healing. Comment spam and Google is between the spammers and Google. I don’t care. I just don’t want to have to hand delete 500 comments, have to manually use SQL to do this, or use a blacklist that won’t scale.
I appreciate Six Apart trying, and I like the throttling, but all I want is good comment management. It’s not sexy tech, but it’s what we need. I’ll wait for 3.0 with the promised comment management. I also hope that we have the option to NOT use the redirect functionality. I don’t want to have to hack this out of the code.