comment spam: what a pain

After being home a few days, I logged onto my website to try to get something out to post. When the splash screen came up and told me that I had 165 new comments to approve, I knew what kind of post this was going to be.

First, for the record, since I upgraded my website to use this automated content management system, I have logged a total of 110 comments. So, being alerted to 165 new comments from a span of 40 hours did not seem to be something normal.

I start digging through the comments to discover that all 165 of them are for one or two online poker sites. I didn’t look at any of them- just deleted all 165. The ironic part is none of the spam comments ever posted to my website have ever been seen by anyone but me. I have to approve every single comment posted.

For the moment, I am suspending the comment option. It is simply too much of a pain to sort through all of the spam. However, once I get back to Austin (read: to a connection faster than 50 kbps), I’ll figure out a solution that will allow comments and reduce spam. At first, it will probably be using a TypeKey registration system. My goal is a system that will blacklist comments from known IP addresses or even better, a system that will blacklist comments with a certain number of “bad” words (i.e. poker, pills, drugs, cheap, etc). For now, I do not have the time to spend on a dial-up connection to figure it out though.

Update: Now, just use Akismet. Problem solved.