Well dang.
You might remember I made a move a couple of weeks ago to try to limit the amount of comment spam I have coming in by closing the comments as they popped up. Wasn't really a big distraction to most readers since it seemed that there were only about two or five very old posts that got the most spam, so I figured as spam came in, I'd shut off the offending post, which I didn't like doing because the comments are a lot better than the actual posts, but I got tired of having to come in and delete ten or twenty stupid messages every morning.
Making it even easier, Miss Jordana pointed out that our Mu.nu blogs have a handy little bit of code where you can close comments older than a certain date, so I inserted that in my template, and made it to where any post has its comments shut down when it gets over 21 days old.
These efforts seemed to have worked very well. There was an entire week there where I didn't get a single spam comment.
However--it's started back now in earnest, and apparently since the old, rarely ever seen posts are unreachable, it's all coming in on new posts. ::sigh:: And it's not even real spam for fly-by-night p00rn dealers and freelance pharmaceutical salesmen--it's those things with web addresses composed entirely of random letters, and the messages are likewise random letters.
Anyway, the comment spammers are back, and it sure would be nice if the people who do this were crushed by a bulldozer.
UPDATE: Well, well. Seems comment spam is a nice way to make money.
Posted by Terry Oglesby at July 10, 2007 08:31 AMI got a bit of that spam too. Very annoying, but a lot less than you would have had if more open posts.
Posted by: Jordana at July 10, 2007 05:23 PMThat's true--I think it would probably also slow them down if our version of Movable Type would allow you to do numerical verification in the comments.
Posted by: Terry Oglesby at July 11, 2007 09:40 AM