One of the benefits of using a standalone MovableType install over a hosted solution is the substantial amount of control you get over comments and trackbacks. The bad thing about it is all the spam you get, but with additional tools such as MT-Blacklist and SpamLookup the job gets a lot easier very quickly.

Now, Typepad users are about to get some additional additional features to manage comment and trackbacks as well.

Included in the soon to be released feature set are the following:

- Support for TypeKey-based comment authentication;

- The ability to moderate comments and trackBacks;

- An enhance user interface for managing comments and trackbacks; and

- The ability to set preferences on whether you’d like to use plain text or HTML email.

Six Apart, makers of Movable Type and Typepad, are saying there will be additional announcements regarding the features over the next few weeks.

Spamroll briefed you on the MT SpamLookup project about a month ago. It has not been installed on Spamroll yet, as MT-Blacklist has been doing just fine, and I wanted to hear how the experts fared with it first.

I just got that chance, and now so do you.

Jay Allen has posted some additional notes on SpamLookup over at the MT-Blacklist/Comment Spam Clearinghouse. He puts it plain and simply:

“Suffice it to say, in looking over my logs every day, SpamLookup blocked about 95% of my spam, moderated the other 4.9999999% and blocked exactly zero real comments and TrackBacks. There has been only ONE spam that has reached my server since I first installed it and I’m pretty sure that that must have been hand-entered. If we’ve made them resort to hand-entering spam, we’ve won the war.”

I’ll “suffice to say” those are pretty impressive results - good enough that I will be tinkering around with SpamLookup forthwith. No doubt Brad Choate deserves thanks for all the work. For you Movable Type users who want to give it a go, you can grab SpamLookup from Brad’s site.

Bloggers have long been peppered with comment and trackback spam. It is a pervasive problem directly related to the gaming of search engines, of which the the biggest target seems to be Google.

Then along came MT-Blacklist, and at least Movable Type users received some relief. Now, one of the folks responsible for Movable Type development has come up with a new plugin with a number of feature enhancements, that may soon supplant it.

SpamLookup is its name, and blog spam killing is its game. While MT-Blacklist does a darn good job keeping known spam links out of blogs, SpamLookup, a creation of Brad Choate of the Six Apart crew, goes a few steps further. Included in the feature set is:

- IP-based blacklisting based on DNS lookup services;

- Domain-based blacklisting based on DNS lookup services;

- Dynamic proxy testing;

- Filtering based on “X-Forwarded-For” HTTP header; and

- Link count limitations.

While some of the services are going to require additional infrastructure support, much as MT-Blacklist does, this is definitely a further step in the right direction.

You can get the further details on the new plugin from MT-Blacklist/Comment Spam Clearinghouse, or grab the new plugin from Brad Choate’s new SpamLookup site.

If you visit MT-Blacklist/Comment Spam Clearinghouse, pay attention to the comments. Some items to note include the fact that MT-Blacklist IS NOT being shut down. Also, there is some question as to what level of server resources the new plugin is going to require. I would be particularly interested in hearing new users comments on that matter, before I take the plunge here at Spamroll.

It seems the blogging community is trying to “fight” back in the comment spam battle. There is a concerted effort in progress to increase the Google PageRank of Wikipedia for the term “online poker.” Somehow, bloggers feel if they can increase Wikipedia’s PageRank, that the spamming of their blogs will stop.

Is this a viable effort, or a show of infantile force? I think there are several issues at hand here.

First, blogging is coming under increasing fire as the “new spam” (which I will explain later today). Otherwise legitimate bloggers across the land will soon be blamed for gaming Google, this time as vigilantes. Second, increasing the PageRank of a single highly used search term is not going to solve anyone’s problems with comment spam. It might teach comment spammers a lesson in the short run, through the show of brute force, but in the end comment spammers will find new tricks. Furthermore, as a prescient post at Slashdot contends (see Slashdot | ‘Online Poker’ Googlebomb), people who search for “online poker” likely want to play online poker, and will be none too happy when they wind up learning the definition of “online poker” at Wikipedia. Inevitably, they will blame bloggers for this, exacerbating the blog/spam issue, and using Google as a pawn to do so.

I think some of this effort pivots on a dearth of knowledge amongst everyday bloggers as to exactly how to fight comment spam. This ignorance will only further comment spammers’ cause. There are several countermeasures specifically designed to thwart comment and trackback spam, and/or make it useless to begin with, but they do no good if they are unknown and/or not installed.

One of the finest efforts I have seen is MT-Blacklist, a Movable Type plugin and clearinghouse effort to block comment and trackback spam before it hits. I wonder if Blogger and other blog-points have implemented similar efforts, and I wonder why more Movable Type users haven’t installed it. The second is the rel=nofollow effort, which tags comments and trackbacks so Yahoo!, Google, and MSN crawlers ignore links with the tag when calculating page rankings. The only problem with rel=nofollow is, like MT-Blacklist, that you have to know about it and install it for it to work.

I won’t get into the ramblings about PageRank, and why it has become such a blatant target for those hell-bent on gaming the system - that is a problem for Google (they made their bed, and now they have to lie in it).

But I think you get the point. Installing these tools is a much better way to fight comment and trackback spam than wielding vigilant swords and screaming “see what we can do.”