Dealing with Tramadol Spam on Movable Type Blogs

I'm looking for a little help with this annoyance. One of the trickiest forms of comment spam to deal with as of late is what I refer to as "Tramadol Spam." This generally consists of message from an author such as TramadoL5198 (the number attached to the name varied) and the body of the comments tend to be ramblings of a somewhat depressed commenter who clearly hasn't read the associated post. Here are the twelve most recent spam comments we've received related to this topic:

My mind is like a bunch of nothing, but I guess it doesn't bother me. I haven't been up to anything recently. I've pretty much been doing nothing to speak of.
I can't be bothered with anything these days, but shrug. I just don't have anything to say recently. I haven't gotten much done recently. Nothing seems worth thinking about.
retty much nothing seems worth thinking about. My life's been completely dull , not that it matters. I've just been staying at home waiting for something to happen.
Not much on my mind. I don't care. I've just been letting everything happen without me , but shrug. Whatever. I feel like a void.
I haven't been up to anything these days. So it goes. I can't be bothered with anything these days.
My life's been basically bland today. More or less nothing seems worth thinking about. My mind is like an empty room. I've more or less been doing nothing to speak of. Not much on my mind recently.
Not much on my mind lately. My life's been completely boring these days. I've just been hanging out not getting anything done. So it goes.
I can't be bothered with anything these days, but such is life. I don't care. So it goes. More or less nothing seems worth thinking about. I've just been hanging out waiting for something to happen, but that's how it is.
I've just been staying at home not getting anything done. I've basically been doing nothing worth mentioning. My life's been pretty unremarkable these days. Eh.
I feel like a complete blank, but I don't care. Pfft. I've pretty much been doing nothing worth mentioning.
I've more or less been doing nothing worth mentioning, but eh. My life's been really bland today. I don't care. I've just been letting everything happen without me these days. That's how it is.
I just don't have anything to say. Not that it matters. Eh. I've just been staying at home doing nothing, but I don't care. That's how it is.

The links associated with the comments generally point to fake search engine results that are made to look like MSN search, but the results consist of what appear to be affiliate links to things like Ebay.

I haven't been able to figure out how to auto-junk this type of spam in Movable Type. I already auto-junk comments using the term "tramadol" but the comments above still sneak through due to the concatenated random numbers attached to each author name. Phrase matching the comments doesn't seem realistic either since there is some randomness to the comment bodies. So, what I'm really looking for is something like Wordpress' blacklist feature that can detect partial matches. That would allow me to auto-junk posts containing the letters t-r-a-m-a-d-o-l in that order regardless of whether there is anything attached to them at either end.

Wordpress actually uses the term Tramadol to help explain their blacklist feature:

Choose your blacklist words wisely!

Remember that partial words can match, so if there is any chance something here might match it would be better to put it in the moderation box. Blacklisting a word such as tramadol will automatically delete any comments containing tramadol, tramadols, bigtramadol, etc. But, blacklisting a word such as ass will automatically delete comments containing ass, asses, assistance, passionate, assumption, etc.

So, can this be done in Movable Type? And if so, how? If you happen to reply in the comments, please use a more innocuous term than "tramadol" in your example so your comment doesn't get auto-junked.

In mt 3.2, the filter seems to learn about tramdol and after awhile auto-junks most of it.

It seems like this should filter comments that include a word where the first characters spell tramadol:
/^tramadol/

Michael, I'm on 3.2, and it does a great job catching most of this stuff. But it's failing when extra numbers are attached to the term. Other triggers like IP blacklists don't seem to be catching this either for me.

The filter can't learn, it doesn't have a bayesian filter. The only way it will junk or moderate your comments is if it matches a keyword, blacklist, or perl expression that you previously entered. If your comments were suddenly auto-junked then either you added a successful keyword/expression, or the spammer is suddenly using something that triggers the auto-junk.

Hmm, I'll go ahead and enter the expression you just posted, Ed, and let you know if I see any spam junked for matching that filter.

Ok, I DID get it to work. Here's the thing--the expression is case sensitive. The spam I get has the T and the L capitalized--when I capitalized it in the expression, it got caught in the junk folder. Try that, and hopefull you will have success as well!

Jennifer, that's great to hear. Thanks for following up with that. I tried it again and still can't get it to work, but think that could be due to a permission setting on a PERL script of something. At least I know the filter does the trick. Cool.

Thank you for the tip on how to deal with this - with the 't' and 'l' capitalized, this works for me, and I've been suffering with this for months.

Apologies - contrary to my posting above, it seems this didn't work after all. However, I'm now trying this expression

in the Spam keyword lookup. According to the regex testers, this should catch the 29847@39748.br addresses and junk them, but now of course, I've got to wait and see.

Comments

1. Posted by: Jennifer Eubanks on October 2, 2006 10:40 AM:

At least in my case, I noticed that all of the comments had one thing in common--the email address has a .br at the end. I have stopped them from publishing using .br in the moderation field. I've been hesitant to auto-junk the .br on the odd chance I get someone legit from Brazil (although this has yet to happen), but at least by putting it in moderation, none of them see the light of day.

If you're confident you don't get legit .br email addresses, this is a simple way to combat the spam. Otherwise, the program also allows you to use regular Perl expressions (which I admit I am not familiar with writing) and you could block the term that appears in the author field regardless of what numbers appear after it.

Good luck, and please share if you find the answer!

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