The Right Stuff

Today I noticed a lot of ItemReferralBlocked events in the activity log of my dasBlog instance. Strangely enough, these blocked referrals were from common sites like Google and other search engines:

Info ItemReferralBlocked:
Item Referral blocked for Installing Windows on a HP Pavilion ze4500 Notebook
from http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&q=pavilion+ze4500+mod...
originating at IP Address 84.59.249.xxx
because of ""

Note the reason: It just states "".

I digged into the source code of the referral blacklist implementation and found that the MovableType blacklist has moved. Nevertheless, dasBlog's core engine will retrieve the blacklist from the original hard-coded URL and create a bogus internal representation based on the informal message behind the old URL. Of course, this message has nothing in common with the current MoveableType blacklist, so the comparison results of the referral against the blacklist are junk, i.e. the source of my blocked item referrals.

You'll have to change line 21 of newtelligence.DasBlog.Web.Core\MovableTypeBlacklist.cs from

private static Uri internetAddress = new Uri("http://www.jayallen.org/comment_spam/blacklist.txt");

to

private static Uri internetAddress = new Uri("http://www.jayallen.org/comment_spam/blacklist_initial.txt");

and recompile dasBlog.

You'll also have to delete the file blacklist.txt inside dasBlog\SiteConfig as it contains a copy of the blacklist that is updated once a day. A simple iisreset or copying the newly compiled assemblies into dasBlog\bin won't help since the aforementioned file isn't likely to be updated immediately from the new URL.

Update: The blacklist is gone.

The patch for the file: MovableType Blacklist Patch.zip

Now playing: Cypress Hill - Black Sunday - What go around come around, kid