i have been frustrated with the comments being down, too. For some reason, the whole of Munuviana has been hit hard recently. Pixy is on it, as he always is, but as you know he's only one man. Superhuman yes, but still only one man. Here's some interesting facts that might shed light on things or at least help us all to be patient:

We got 1.3 million trackbacks over the past 30 days, and 550,000 comments. About 99.8% of trackbacks and over 90% of comments were spam. Over 99% of the spam got blocked, but that still left a lot of cleaning up.

. . .

Massive amounts of comment spam coming in right now - several thousand a minute. Busy upgrading Fluffy's armament. Back soon.

Ugh. Seriously ugh. We're talking over a hundred comments a second here.

Update: New super doom-Fluffy installed. We'll see how we go with that.

Update update: 75,000 80,000 85,000 spams from a single source in under 90 minutes. It would have been more than that except that the server ground to a halt under the load. It's sped up significantly now that it's all being blocked immediately.

Update update update: Out of 90,000 95,000 spams, four actually got through. Congrats to Ted, Linda, Daniel and Lawren, who won the prize.

Update^4: 100,000! It's now 104 minutes since the flood started

Update^5: Looks like it's leveled off at a steady 1500 spams a minute. I wonder how long they'll keep up this futile exercise?

Update^6: Just past the two hour mark and it seems to have stopped. 123,111 spam attempts, four of which got through, for a success rate of 0.00324%. I shall now delete those four spams... And done.

. . .

We have to move off Movable Type; we have no choice in the matter. However, no-one will be forced off MT before they're ready. The new servers will be able to cope with the existing users just fine; the problem is that further growth will bring serious problems. We're already the largest MT installation in the world, and worse, we are stuck on version 2.6 due to licensing issues.

Posted by: annika at 09:38 AM | Comments (8) | Add Comment
Post contains 361 words, total size 2 kb.

1 This is precisely the reason I moved platforms. When I realized that every morning I was waking up to stave off a new spam attack--and that if I didn't do it, the spammers were able to take down the server every morning--I realized that I simply couldn't stay with MT. As much as I had enjoyed the ride, I hated having to spend so much time fighting the spammers.

Posted by: zombyboy at November 10, 2005 09:59 AM (1yNBe)

2 Yes. Come over to the dark side of WordPress.

Posted by: Robbie at November 10, 2005 12:50 PM (lbWbV)

3 Ordinarily, I would think of a male named "Pixy" as being more well versed in show-tunes than in being a Warrior King, I have to give him credit there.

Posted by: skippystalin at November 10, 2005 04:21 PM (ohSFF)

4 As you know, Annie, someof the other blogs have these weird distorted letters you have to match before it will allow a comment to be sent. I think that effectively blocks the spammers.... Maybe they should use that system???

Posted by: shelly at November 10, 2005 04:40 PM (6mUkl)

5 One advantage annika has in Munuvia is everything is free. Server space, tech support...all kindsa shit. It's perfect for a starving law student: No money down, no montly payment...heck, tell me who couldn't afford that!

Posted by: Victor at November 10, 2005 05:33 PM (l+W8Z)

6 Definitely can't beat free. I believe the tool shelly is referring to is called 'captcha,' where you have to type in a random combination of a word and numbers. I've heard other bloggers say it's highly effective; but I've only seen that on Expression Engine blogs...

Posted by: Amy Bo Bamy at November 11, 2005 07:31 AM (Wz2Gp)

7 I stand corrected; the captcha tool is also available from Pmachine Pro...

Posted by: Amy Bo Bamy at November 11, 2005 07:33 AM (Wz2Gp)

8 Of course, pMachine and EE are from the same company. We use EE, and the captcha thing really does work. Comment spam went from ten or twenty a day to zero immediately. Then, the trackback spam started...

Posted by: buckethead at November 14, 2005 11:02 AM (ztNrs)

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