Filmstalker: Comment spam and downtime

Hi everyone. You may have noticed that the site went down for ten minutes or so there, that's because the Web Server just restarted. I managed to chat to the support guys online, as I am now, and they have told me that the comment system was hitting 99% CPU usage and caused the system to restart. Bad news.

However the guys at Webattention restarted pretty damn quick and Filmstalker was back within minutes. Since then I've had to do some behind the scenes work and that means commenting is currently down, but don't worry it should only be for a few minutes. You'll know once it's back because I'll update this post and let you know...plus you'll be able to comment.

With that are there any MT or Web Programming type people out there who can give some advice on preventing this happening again? Feel free to drop me an email or send in a comment - when they work again!

Update:
...and comments are back. For now. I have to find some long term solution to stop spam bots hitting the comments...answers on a postcard to...

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It might be worth having a look at Akismet. There are two Movable Types plugins which use Akisment, and they can be found here:

http://www.nonplus.net/software/mt/Akismet.htm

http://akismet.com/blog/2006/04/for-mt/

Hopefully this would provide better automatic spam filtering. Akismet is built into my blogging engine of choice - Wordpress, and I've heard many great things about it (it's working brilliantly for me).

Posted by: Dan | June 2, 2006 10:49 AM

"that the comment system was hitting 99% CPU usage and caused the system to restart."

Man, I think we are overposting. Richard, you should really stop making your site interesting, it's entirely all your fault all this is happening!

Posted by: Simone | June 2, 2006 11:05 AM

you can tell your site is popular when it gets the attention.

Great work on getting it back up so quickly as well. where would i go to complain(i mean talk about) about movies if this site isn't available???

Posted by: pablo | June 2, 2006 11:06 AM

Richard,

Every once in a while I have to go into the MT install directory in cgi-bin and just rename the mt-comments.cgi file to something different and then update that in mt.cfg.

There are also anti-comment-spam plugins at the main site plus you can adjust the level of sensitivity in the included spam filter in MT.

Vic

Posted by: Screen Rant | June 2, 2006 4:21 PM