More on comments and blog spam
All right, here's the summary. Regular readers, feel free to skip :-)
A couple of months ago, I received e-mail from my host, Lunarpages, saying that the script Movable Type uses for comments was chewing up near 90% of the CPU on the server I'm stored on. Because of that, they were disabling that script, killing comments on my site.
Since I was getting thousands of pieces of blog spam a week -- mostly blocked by the wonderful MT-Blacklist -- that didn't surprise me.
I conferred with Lunarpages, and after I closed comments on most of my old posts and upgraded to the latest version of Movable Type, they re-enabled the script.
Earlier today, I received another e-mail from Lunarpages, saying that I was still using 90% of the CPU on the server with the same script, so they shut it down again.
After doing a bit of research, I realized that although I had shut down comments, the blogspammers were still hitting that script with thousands of requests -- and even though it wasn't responding, it did have to wake up long enough to deny the request.
The solution came in the form of this excellent post, which (in summary) recommends changing the name of the mt-comments.cgi script to... something else. No, I'm not going to say what I changed it to. You never know who's listening.
Anyway, what that should do is prevent the blogspammers who have that URL in their database from being able to find it again easily, thus preventing server load, thus keeping both my esteemed hosts and you, faithful readers, happy.