F'in Comment Spammers

Okay, I don’t know what it is but in the last two days I have had to delete about seventy different spam comments. WTF. I don’t know if Akismet is just not up to the task anymore or what, but this is crazy.

I think it said about 3750 spam comments blocked when I clicked the “Delete All” button for the latest batch of 100 or so.

They come in waves, too. No idea if it’s an indication of the popularity of my site, but I doubt it.

I think tomorrow I will write two new utilities for my blog:

1) A script to automatically close comments for certain types of articles after a certain number of days. For instance, nobody is going to comment on my del.icio.us links. Ever. Why run with them open? Maybe I’ll leave them for three or four days.

2) A script to automatically find and kill comment spammers. Not just a quick death, but a long, painful one involving cucumbers, grizzly bears, and sandstone. And not the nice cucumbers, either, but the homegrown ones with all the little spiky things on them.

Grrrr. I sorta don’t want to moderate all comments because I’ve inadvertently hosed legitimate comments among the spam deletions. I don’t want all y’all to have to wait for me to get around to approving them, either, because that’s lame. At the same time the signal-to-noise ratio must be maintained.

Maybe for now the best defense is just limiting my exposure where I can.

Update: Apparently Akismet suffered some downtime, causing this. BTW, I love blogs (and ping services) because where else can you make a comment about software and have one of the lead guys comment within minutes? Thanks Matt!