Well, there we go. That’s a nasty couple of days out of the way, which will hopefully only serve to make tomorrow nicer - at least by comparison if nothing else.

I was at my desk before nine yesterday morning and left it just after nine - twelve and a bit hours later. In fact, that wasn’t really the end of the day, either, as I brought stuff home and worked through until half ten then ate toast in front of some Steve Penk rubbish on ITV, made only slightly more bearable by the absence of all but his voice.

Browsing through my blog listings tonight, though, I spotted something very interesting (I use the word with hesitation since it would probably only be of interest to anyone else using Movable Type).

The photoblog that runs across the top of the front page of nik.co.uk seems to have had 33 comments added to it by Pastrami Sandwich, the pseudonym of the guy who posted almost 700 comments to my main blog, which ultimately led to it being deleted in preparation for some pretty serious reconstructive surgery.

The thing is, though, comment posting is disabled on entries in that blog by default, which clearly means that the bots that post comment spam don’t go through your interface at all, but attack the commenting script within your Movable Type installation directory, which perhaps explains how they manage to burn through your entries so quickly.

A quick hunt through Google proves this hypothesis to be correct, and it seems there are dozens of fixes that should help fight it, rather than entirely eliminate it. Over the next couple of days, if I get time, I’ll hunt them down and note them here for future reference, then when things calm down a bit, implement them. In the meantime I’ll just have to keep my fingers crossed that it doesn’t happen again, and have activated comment throttling so that no IP address can post more than one comment every minute to the site.

Fortunately version 3, about to enter Alpha testing, includes ‘comment registration’, which should hopefully clear up the problem once and for all.

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