Since this blog opened for business in December 2002, y’all have left 700 or so comments. But the number of comments that haven’t been posted is more interesting. For several months last fall, I stopped accepting any new comments, while I figured out the best way to cope with comment spammers. I settled on MT-Blacklist, an add-in to the Movable Type software that runs this blog. Since December 15, 2004, here’s how effective it’s been.
That’s an average of 146 blocked comments per day, 90% of them rejected automatically. I honestly don’t know what I would do without this add-in.
I’m also not sure what I would do if I ever met a comment spammer face to face.