Spam, spam, spam…

Unbelievable! The MMISoftware blog was spammed to death…. there were so many comments submitted and awaiting moderation, that it was impossible to access the WordPress management system for the site to clear all the spam! There was a backlog of over 25,000 messages.

As a result we took down the blog for a few days, cleared the spam from the database using MySQL commands (a 2 second job) and upgraded the WordPress software to version 2.

Version 2 has much better spam handling than the previous version we were using, so hopefully the spam problem has been solved. We have also taken the opportunity to upgrade WordPress over at the thesnowsite blog.

Now, where did all this ‘spam’ comment come from? Well, I guess it is back to the Zombie problem that we reported on in an earlier post. And judging by the type of spam received there are obviously large ‘zombie’ networks out there pumping out the false blog comments.

Update: Since add the ‘spam filter’ plugin to the MMISoftware blog 10 hours ago we have caught 40 spam messages.

Update II: The filter has not even been in place for 24 hours and it has caught over 100 spam messages.

Update III: We have now added a spam counter to the front page – 27 Jan 2007 23:26:45