Recently some of our MovableType blogs started to receive hundreds of spam comments and trackbacks every day. We’ve been using the MT-Blacklist and MT-Moderate plugins to try to control the spam, but a lot of it was still getting through and it was getting difficult to keep up with it. So I decided to try the new SpamLookup plugin.

SpamLookup is a MovableType plugin written by Brad Choate for identifying and removing comment and trackback spam on your blog. It uses many different techniques to identify spam and it is completely configurable by the blog administrator. It features:

• IP and Domain-based blacklisting based on DNS lookup services. It uses existing lists of known spammer IP addresses and domain names to check if the comment or trackback is coming from a legitimate source.
• Dynamic proxy testing detects if the sender is an open proxy.
• Checking HTTP headers. The “X-Forwarded-For” HTTP header typically indicates that a proxy is being used.
• Moderate or block based on the number of links in a message. If your readers include and average of 1-3 links in their comments, then having 5 links might be a sign of spam. The threshold is configurable.
• Wordlists can be use to specify words or patterns that cause moderation or blocking of comments and trackbacks.
• Passphrase protection allows you to require your readers to enter a specific passphrase before they are allowed to comment.
• Despam feature that allows you to run the filters against all the existing comments and trackbacks. This is great when you are installing SpamLookup after a receiving a lot of spam, you can get rid of it with one click of the mouse.
• Knows about MT-Moderate’s trackback moderation so you can run both plugins at the same time.

So, I disabled MTBlacklist and installed SpamLookup. After a few tweaks to the configuration it started to moderate all of the spam. I had set it to moderate at first because I wanted to make sure it wasn’t blocking any legitimate content, but now I have it set to block most of the spam detected. You can still check the log to see if something was blocked that should have been allowed, but you cannot recover it.

I highly recommend this plugin for your MovableType blog. Even if you are not getting any spam right now, chances are you will in the future, better to be one step ahead.