December 20, 2004 — (WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — Servers at Web hosting companies are being slowed by comment spam attacks on Movable Type Weblogs, leading some hosting companies to disable the blogging tool, a report by ExpressNewsline.com says.
Comment spam, generated by automated scripts, bombards Weblogs with comments that link to Web sites offering typical spam fare such as prescription drugs or pornography. The link spam, as it is sometimes known, is designed to take advantage of Google’s algorithm, which is know to value external links to a Web site as a measure of its popularity, in order to boost a site’s popularity.
The issue has overloaded servers at a number of hosting companies, especially in shared hosting environments, the report said. Jay Allen of Six Apart, publisher of the Movable Type Weblog, said in the report that the problems can be attributed to two bugs in Movable Type that cause it to rebuild posts even when no pages are being changed, allowing comment spam attacks to tie up server resources.
In shared hosting environments, where many Web sites share a single server’s resources, highly active scripts can monopolize overall resources, negatively impacting other customers. To remedy the situation, a host will often ban a script or application from its shared servers.
