Spammed to Corruption

As longtime readers may have noticed, this blog is experiencing some major malfunctions today. An evil comment spammer has been targeting MT blogs with multiple comment porn postings. Visit the MovableType support forum for more details. On Saturday, the spammer hit me 20 or so times, corrupting my comments db. Three of the comments were malformed, which for those blogs running on Berkeley is usually fatal. I’ve exported my entries and comments and have all of them safe and secure. No data has been lost, but the database has been corrupted and will eventually deteriorate to the point of uselessness. So, before I reimport the entries and comments, I’ll finally be converting this blog to MySql (I know, I’ve threatened to do this before). As this spammer has exposed a weakness via the comments feature, I’m unsure about whether I’ll be turning the comments feature back on once the conversion has taken place. Another blogger and MT are separately working on a hack that will mostly solve this problem for 80 or so percent of MT bloggers (those running on Apache servers).

By the way, if any attorneys out there in the blogosphere are interested in a test case, I’d like to sue the rotten bastard spammer for destruction of personal property (my database file). Not for spamming me, mind you, but for the damage done to my database as a result of their spambot. That is – once him/her/it has been revealed. The spammer’s real IP address is likely cloaked, as I banned the IP recorded with the comments, yet the spams kept on coming from the banned IP address.

Stay tuned. I’ll be back soon with my archives fully intact. Someone’s got to give you your libertarian tirades.