phil ringnalda

You’ve probably heard that MT 2.661 is out now, and that it includes a spam throttle. I think that’s a very good thing, though only in my own twisted way.

What the stock spam throttle does is look for a comment in the last ThrottleSeconds (either in your mt.cfg file, or the default 20 seconds) coming from the same IP address, and if there was one, returns your comment error template, with the message that they need to slow down. If the they isn’t actually a human, looking at what comes back, then 8 attempts in ten times ThrottleSeconds earns them a place in your Banned IP list.

That may actually be effective, once. I presume that somewhere in the world, there is someone who wants to spam comments (more likely a troll than a real spammer), who actually hasn’t ever heard of anonymous proxies, or doesn’t know how to use them. Note that “someone” is singular. Lord knows I haven’t had much luck with banned IPs lately.

Still, I think it’s a good thing, since I do my best (okay, my only) Perl coding when I’m just altering what someone else did, rather than having to start from scratch. The code for the stock throttle saved me who knows how long trying to figure out how to put in a real throttle. A little copy, and little paste, a few minor changes, and now I only accept one comment every six times ThrottleSeconds, no matter what the IP address. I doubt that there’s anyone likely to be leaving a legitimate comment here who won’t understand when they get a message saying “Hang on for a few, and try again, I’m throttling right now.”

Of course, there’s a downside to that sort of throttle: anyone who wants to DoS my comments can: a crapflood is likely to be the one that gets in, once every six times ThrottleSeconds, so everyone else will be shut out until it stops. As Shelley said, that’s part of the new reality. We no longer live in that pretty world where we could always expect every part of everyone’s site to be working and available every second. Worst comes to worst, you can always put what you want to say on your site, and just count on Trackback, referers, and an eventual comment, to make it over to my site. Or, leave the window/tab open, and keep trying to post when you think of it: who knows, you might slip it in, and cost the crapflooder one opening :)

This isn’t as exact as most of my hack instructions, since things are a bit in flux, and I’m a bit out of practice. You want this wherever your working throttle code is, either in {mt}/lib/MT/App/Comments.pm or in {mt}/extlib/jayallen/MTBlPost.pm if that’s where you’ve copied it out to have them work together. The magic number 6, which may not be the right number, should be pretty easy to spot, and change. Note that this code bit needs to come after the first, “throttle them but don’t ban them yet” by IP bit, since it expects the variables to have already been declared. You’ll probably want to change “Put your funny wait a bit message here” to an actual message, too.

    @ts = MT::Util::offset_time_list(time - $app->{cfg}->ThrottleSeconds*6-1,
                                                 $entry->blog_id);
    $from = sprintf("%04d%02d%02d%02d%02d%02d",
                           $ts[5]+1900, $ts[4]+1, @ts[3,2,1,0]);
    if (MT::Comment->count({ created_on => [$from] },
                                         { range => {created_on => 1}}))
    {
      	 $app->log("Throttled comment, had one in the last ". 6 * $app->{cfg}->ThrottleSeconds ." seconds.");
      	 return $app->handle_error($app->translate("Put your funny wait a bit message here"), "403 Throttled");
    }

Simple as that, if nothing else you either cut down the number of posts you get before you notice what’s happening and take direct action to stop them, or possibly cut the number that make it through from a crapflood while you sleep.