At last I have found a plugin to deal with the mountains of spam winging its way to this blog. The latest update of Movable Type helped but spammers like TramadoL1234 kept getting through the spam filter. Repeatedly. Thankfully I was alerted to the cure all by That Canadian Girl. The panacea comes in the form of Akismet. I think it is specifically designed for wordpress but there are plugins developed for MT and most other blogging systems that I can think of, just check out the developer page.
**UPDATE – Jan 13th 2007**
I’ve disabled Akismet from my blog. I don’t reckon it works with MT, I’m sure its a wonder with wordpress but it just doesn’t seem to learn from its errors on my system.
After downloading the movable type version of Askimet I was initially very happy indeed – I found it completely wiped out all the spam posts that had been sneaking through my existing barrier.
Problem is, it seems to work by blocking all legitimate comments too – I was beginning to feel quite lonely in my little corner of cyberspace. The only way to avoid missing my comments was to trawl through the 200 and odd spam messages each day. Thats no different to marking all comments for review and is a tedious task.
I am now using a captcha style plugin called comment challenge. So far so good, legitimate commenters have been allowed through and no errors detected in the last 24 hours. I would have gone for the real captcha method but my attempts at installation failed. The comment challenge plugin has been designed as an easy installation module.
