Killing Comment Spam Dead

Started receiving comment spam on this weblog around May. Began as a curiosity, but eventually grew into an annoyance (interestingly, comment spammers were inordinately targeting that very post, over and over again, as if out of spite). But in the past few weeks, it’s become a major hassle. Unlike email spam, dealing with comment spam in MT requires visiting the IP Ban section of the back-end and entering the commenter’s first two triplets (to account for dynamic IP assignment, at the risk of banning some innocents), searching for the entry, deleting the bum comments, and rebuilding the entry.

But recently Michael Bazely (who is, coincidentally, Oaklandish!) pointed out Jay Allen’s ingenious confabulation of a few freely available MT plugins and a couple of tweaks to the default comment template, all of which conspire to provide an MT blacklist for comment spammers.

The beauty part is that Jay’s system doesn’t ban arbitrary objects like IP numbers — it goes for the jugular by banning what comment spammers really want to appear — their URLs. We’ll see how it goes, but initial tests show it working perfectly.