I had this idea the other day that I would turn comments back on after shutting them down from some months due to the flood of comment spam that was hitting my site (and email box). I was inspired by the release of a new version of MT and their guide to fighting comment spam.
The approach I took basically involved downloading and installing the latest MT-Blacklist plugin as well as a plugin to throttle the number of comments in a given hour. While the combination of both methods help to lesson the amount of comment spam I was receiving, it still managed to trickle through. Once I started getting hit with trackback spam, the fight was on.
I caved and followed Tom Sherman’s advice and installed the SCode plugin which uses Captcha to thwart non-human spam bots. So far so good.
I then worked through his tutorial on fighting trackback spam and installed his script that will randomly rename my trackback and comment scripts. After one false start (I needed to uncomment and rename the Trackback script in my mt.cfg file) I was able to get this up and running. I setup the script to run via cron so hopefully I’m done with fighting this crap until the spammers figure out another way to annoy us.
While I was at it I also changed the format of my site back to what I call retro-ugly. I have a lot of other housekeeping duties I need to get done, but they’ll come at a later date.