It is so frustrating that I have to say this, but I've had some comment-spam issues to deal with here on MovableType. Programmers out there with nothing better to do have created tools that automatically seek out blogs and spam the ever-loving shit out of them. This serves as an annoyance more than anything to me, but it has the ability to cripple a site, shatter morale and vandalize the site that has been a passion of mine for coming-up-on-five years for me now.

If most of you haven't noticed junk comments on the site, it's because the comments were being posted to old entries. I have been posting since June 5, 2000 and now more than 1,000 entries are online and accessible via the web.

Spam gurus explain the obvious: Never post your email address on a website. Comment-spam gurus explain the ridiculous: shut off comments on old entries.

...and to that point, let me just say that it's not going to happen. I like this site as a living document. I like the discussion that happens here, and in older discussions, I like knowing that people I know and total strangers can toss in their $.02 It's a neat thing to have this ability, and I enjoy finally being able to accomodate my dreams of one day having a site where people can reply and get that immediate gratification of participation.

The good news is that white-hat programmers have learned about these troublemakers and created programs to fight "comment spam." One such creation is called MT-Blacklist (MT meaning MovableType and BlackList meaning...well... blacklist.) This isn't a new program to MT users, just new to me. Right now, it uses a bank of known-problem programmers and has a lot of power using regular expressions to eliminate spam.

This is much better than the old method of finding the trouble-maker's IP address and blocking that out so he/she/it couldn't spam again. This was a big pain-in-the-ass for me to do, so it's nice not to have to do that anymore. It didn't matter much, since the comment-spammer was spoofing IPs as they posted. I was blocking unnecessarily.

So what does this mean to you? Not much. If your URL has "poker" in it, I guarantee it'll never make it to the site. I had to get medieval on the ass of the new Texas Hold 'em spammers, since each URL was similar, but cleverly unique enough to fight even regular expressions. So sometimes it would be Texas-Hold-Em and sometimes it was Fantasy Holdem Poker or Poker for Texans who hold'em. okay, maybe not that last one. I ended up deciding that I'd probably never have a blog where I asked people what they thought about the game, and even if I did, there would be plenty of ways to describe the game without using that word. Since I've blocked it, more than 500 comments have been blocked out, and I didn't have to block IP addresses manually.

So here's to you, comment-spammers. You had your 15 minutes. I'm not letting you get to me.

'Cause that's how you win.