MT-Blacklist

It seems that Jay Allen has shutdown both MT-Blacklist and the ‘master blacklist’ due to bandwidth problems caused by either a denial of service attack or inconsiderate developers.

Jay hosted a regularly updated file of regular expressions that powered the MT-Blacklist comment spam blocking add-in for Movable Type 2.x. He also published a changes feed that made it easy for others to update their own black lists using the master feed. Unfortunately some developers ignored the feed and simply pulled the whole file all the time and just recently this issue has escalated and led to severe bandwidth usage and denial of service as server hosting the blacklist struggled to cope with the demand.

I first noticed the problem yesterday when the automatic failure emails that I get from my auto update script started coming once an hour rather than once in a blue moon. My blacklist here was updated hourly from Jay’s feed using mt-bl-update.pl, a script that grabbed the update feed and integrated the updates into the local list. This morning, when the updates had been failing consistently for almost a day, I checked up on Jay’s site and found the news. :(

Jay, thank you for all your work, it was appreciated.

Looks like it’s time to upgrade to Movable Type 3.2.