Commenting Note
Posted on January 7, 2005 Posted by John Scalzi 3 Comments
Just to let you all know, sometime soon — probably in the next week — I’m going to disable commenting for all threads previous to December 2004, in an attempt to minimize spammation. So if there’s something you want to say on any of the posts earlier than this, now’s the time.
You may want to take a look at disabling trackbacks, too. I’ve been following the WordPress forums, and the new innovation in spam appears to be trackback spam. Most spamfighting methods don’t touch trackbacks yet, so this is catching a lot of people unprepared.
I guess the lesson is: if people can find a way to bug you, they will.
I saw one of those numbers-in-a-funny-background sort of verifiers in use on someone’s blog some time ago. It seems to work, as the guy doesn’t complain about commment spamming any more. I’d check it out if I were you.
For what it’s worth, I just did the upgrade to MT 3.14, and I’ve been using the BlackList Plugin for MT for several months now. It stops almost all the spam tossed at my blog, allowing maybe 1 or 2 per thousand to slip through to the point where I’ve got to look at it and go “Yep, that’s spam” and tell BlackList not to bother me with it again.
Nice blog, BTW… I’ll be referencing it on mine as soon as I get OMW from Amazon and read it. I was impressed by the sample pages, and will look forward to more of your fiction eagerly.
J.