GSB Mennonite

spam

Classic. Thank you for that contribution. Say hi to Mr. Paulson for me. :)

I'd suggest a baseball bat and the willingness to use it.

Seriously though, from what I've heard just tweaking your blog with a captcha might help. Or renaming the form elements... or lots of little things. Most require a bit of code-tweaking though.

Use captcha. Allows you to display a image with numbers which need to be entered before posting is allowed.

http://james.seng.cc/archives/000145.html

I thought about using captcha, but didn't want to annoy my commentors. Instead, I am using mt-blacklist and mt-close. I only update my blacklist when I get new spam (I add the offending address). I use mt-close every month or so. It closes commenting on older threads. I set my threshold to 1 month. Any post less than a month old is still commentable, any thread older than that, you can still read comments but you can't make new ones.

This is good for a number of reasons. First, mt-blacklist may block spam, but the spam attempts on your posts with open comments can still bring a web server to its knees. Second, it makes the size of the target you're presenting to the big, bad internet minimal.

The bad part is that nobody can comment to your old threads. Personally, I've never in my 3+ years of blogging had a useful comment to an old thread. Some other people may have a different experience. If you're worried about this, I'd just make sure that there is an email link to you somewhere obvious, for would-be commentators to use.

>2_cents<

Yeah, captcha just seems like too high transaction costs. I didn't know about MT-Close. I'll have to check that out. I use MT-Blacklist and have added some specific words just to block more spam and also because they're words that don't come up often in my blog. ;)