Some of you may have experienced slow connections or were unable to connect to your sites during the afternoon today. Everything should be working now.
WHAT HAPPENED?
One of our clients using Movable Type 2.661, was slammed with comment spam, getting over 40,000 comments in a short period of time. This "clogged the pipes" (as it were) with spam, which made it slower and more difficult to connect to the server.
WHAT DID WE DO TO THIS CLIENT?
The client has been flogged. Afterwards, he removed the offending mt-comments.cgi script from his server, effectively stopping the flow of comment spam.
WHAT CAN I DO TO MAKE SURE IT ISN'T MY SITE THAT CRASHES THE SERVER?
If you're using Movable Type on a blog hosted by FictCo, a simple solution is to simply close comments after a certain amount of time (A week or so usually allows people who want to comment enough time to do so.) Closed comments can be read, but new comments cannot be added. Movable Type 3 has slightly better comment protection, as well, so if you're still using 2.6x, upgrade. Movable Type has some other suggestions, too; see below.
WHERE CAN I LEARN MORE ABOUT MT & COMMENTS?
Jay Allen (of MT Blacklist Fame) posted a fairly detailed article on blog spam at the MT website: article.
The offending client has asked us to apologize on his behalf for the inconvenience.
Posted by JVG at 12.17.2004