The battle against comment spam continues

I had to go dumpster diving today to retrieve comments that my rather over-zealous spam filters installed on this blog had deemed to be spam.  While I was in there, knee deep in penile implants, concert cancellations and other nefarious forms of comment spam, I noticed that this blog receives about 20 spam comments every half hour or so on an ongoing basis.  The problem with this is that legitimate comments that you left are being swallowed up by the sheer volume of spam and I am not getting to see what your views are and neither are all the other visitors to this blog.

I have tried a couple settings to protect against comment spam and these have included closing comments altogether and trying to use Movable Type’s built in spam filters and the end results have been no comments whatsoever and being inundated with spam.  Neither result is ideal.

Six Apart has an authentication service called Typekey which ties in with Movable Type.  I decided to try restrict comments to authenticated commentators only in the hope that I will see more legitimate comments and a lot less spam on the backend.  Unfortunately this does mean that if you would like to comment on posts in this blog you will need to register with Typekey.  Registration is free and while this is a bit of a hassle, I do appreciate your comments and would like to see more of them here.  I would also like to avoid going dumpster diving every day just to clear out all the gunk to get to your gems.

I am open to suggestions on how to reduce comment spam, enable legitimate comments and make the whole process easier for legitimate commentators if you have any innovative ideas.  In the meantime, let’s try this out.  Please feel free to let me know what your experiences commenting on this blog are.

Thanks for bearing with me as I experiment with different solutions.

Paul