Comment spam sucks
Comment spam hasn't happened much on this blog, so I've been hand-deleting the spams and banning the IP addresses of the machines issuing the spam. (Not that these machines are owned by the spammers themselves - they're probably random PCs infected by a virus, but that doesn't mean they won't send more spam if allowed.) Then last night, 12 new comment spams appeared. That's way too much to clean up by hand, especially with Movable Type's comment administration workflow, which requires me to ban each IP address and remove each spam individually.
That's what finally convinced me to install the SCode plugin (which was written by James Seng). When you post comments now, you'll also have to input a captcha-style security code. I hope it's not too much of an inconvenience, but it was either this, or turn off comments (and life without comments would suck).
Please, give the new comment posting system a try and drop me a line if there are any problems. My email address is andy (curly 'a' thing) dullroar.org. (Yes, I know what an @ is, but I don't want to make things too easy for spammers that take email addresses off of web pages. Also, on a random note, do you know how tough it is to find information about @? You can't just google for it, believe me.)