(Written by kencraw)

Well I wondered how long it would take for the new blog to get “found” by the comment spammers. They’re back in force, submitting about 5-10 comment spams a day. It’ll only get worse. I had been filtering them by number of links in the comment, but in addition to that having the side-effect of moderating a couple of valid comments who included more than one link, it also didn’t stop the spammers smart enough to only post one link.

The point of all of this is that I’m going to have to take more aggressive action. I’ve enabled a spam plugin called Akismet which is supposed to work pretty well without requiring any action by the commentors. It works the same way e-mail spam checkers work by comparing comments to known instances of spam. We’ll see how it works. I fear that it’ll either block too many valid comments or not block enough of the spam comments. If you find that your comments aren’t going through, please e-mail me at blog aT thecrawfordfamily d0t net.

If this spam plugin doesn’t work, I’ll step things up to the math based comment filter that requires you to answer a simply math question like “what’s the integral of X squared over the square-root of X where X is unbound?” OK, OK, OK, I’ll stick with whats 3 + 4 or something like that. That worked pretty well over at my old blog and didn’t seem to bother the commentors too much.

Let me know in the comment box if you have any suggestions for how to rid the earth of these digital scumbags.