Tikkabik

Checking MT-Blacklist, I see that it has blocked more than 42,000 spam attempts made to the comments fields on this blog. That's pretty ridculous, when you come right down to it -- I've been running MT-Blacklist since September, and before that, had to cull them by hand.

As it was, I was still putting a lot of work into spam control. Every day, I'd have to add more entries to MT-Blacklist's ... well, blacklist. Sometimes I'd wake up and find forty or fifty new spam entries. Whoever these people are, there's a special place in hell waiting for them.

Part of it, admittedly, is my fault. I've never actually gotten around to closing the comments fields of all my old blog entries. As you can see from the calendar, I've been writing for a while. And what's more, I'm chatty. So there are a lot of potential points of entry.

Enter Conversation Killer, a nifty little Movable Type plug-in that can automatically shut down comment fields after a pre-determined period of time. I have it set to shut off comments more than 28 days old.

While there are still a few old blog posts that generate legitimate traffic, the great percent is nothing but spam. Most of the new blog posts don't get spam -- for whatever reason, the spam-spiders only go for the old stuff.

It took a bit to configure, and I had to figure out how to set up a crontab to make my server automatically run the job periodically, but once I did, it seems that it's working. I checked some old forum posts and people are indeed prohibited from posting there, so it's had its desired effect.

For how long, though, I don't know.