Sorry everyone
I've just had to delete 280 spam comments, going back only a week or so. MovableType has an excellent junk comment filter - 280 comments got caught and marked as junk, and I only got notified by e-mail of 10 comments that were spam. Still - I have to glance down the junk comment list to make sure I've not deleted a genuine comment.
So, hate to do it, but I've had to go to authenticated-only commenting.
Movable Type (of which this blog is an instance) uses TypeKey for this. All you do is create a TypeKey account. You then sign in and have the option to stay signed in for a fortnight. You're then allowed to comment again. As a bonus, you only have to type your name once.
Sorry about that - I'll look into introducing some human-only security feature to weed out the spambots, then I should be able to go allow anonymous comments again.
Comments
Wonder why certain blogs are more/less susceptible to spam? I've been blogging for over a year and I've had hardly any spam comments (maybe a dozen or so all told). I get random comments quite often from odd people who use the same blog provider I do, but usually they're just unbelievers picking a fight, rather than automatic trawlers looking to pounce on unsuspecting victims. 280 in a week seems extraordinary! Did you do anything to attract them?
Don't know why some more than others. I don't do anything to attract them - your pagerank is actually slightly higher than mine, so more / better webpages link to your blog than mine. If anything yours should attract more spam.
I can tell you why yours is immune, though. When you go to enter a comment, you have to type the validation code in. That technology is designed so that only a human eye can decipher the validation code (for the time being!). So spambots are locked out. I need to find a MovableType plugin that does something similar.
On the bright side, now you're posting as an authenticated commenter, I can tell my blog to automatically trust your comments. They now get published without the need for my approval first. I might regret that ;-)
Ah, of course. I'd forgotten about the verification mine always asks for. And it's so sensitive that it frequently rejects the comments of real people too (seems to have been better about that lately, I hope).
How do I know what pagerank I have?
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