blame the spammers

For the longest time, this weblog did not receive anything except the occasional trackback spam… unfortunately, over the almost-two-years of its existence, that “occasional” has increased to “basically minute-by-minute”, and comment spam has thrown itself into the arena as well. There is nothing I can really do about the trackback spam except intercept it before it gets posted, and ensure it never sees the light of day. Unfortunately, spammers do not seem to take note of this defensive maneuver, and continue to throw spam out like it was going out of style. Such is the life of a weblogger.
As for comment spam, I have decided to take a slightly more proactive course of action on the matter. As of now, in order to comment on any of the posts on this weblog (both mine and Shane’s), you must be an “authenticated user”. Thankfully, this is not nearly as difficult as it sounds, and many options are available to you for your authentication enjoyment. First off, you can simply register with this weblog directly, and have your own local login information for the system to identify you with. Considering my immense and passionate hatred towards all things spammer- and spam-related (excluding the delicious, edible meat, that is), it goes without saying that your email address will never be used for anything, except possibly contacting you if something is wrong with one of your comments. If you do not feel comfortable with that option (and I certainly will not hold it against you if you do), MovableType 4.0 also allows for commenters to have registrations with OpenID, LiveJournal, Vox, and TypeKey. The first and last are nothing more than registration services, with the latter being run by SixApart (the makers of MovableType), if you do not know what the second is, you have been living under a rock for the past few years, and the third is a weblogging solution also provided by SixApart. Can you really blame them for wanting to use their own material? At any rate, one of those solutions should strike you as being mildly secure… and, if not, well, I guess commenting here was not really that important for you.
Yes, I know that some people do not like having to register to leave comments. Yes, I know that this move will probably decrease the number of comments my weblog receives (though, considering I only get maybe one a week, will it make that large of a difference?). But until someone comes up with a way of tracking down all of the identities of all of the various people behind all of the massively numerous spamming engines out there and then sending a tactical nuke to each of their locations… this is about the only option available to me.
Oh, and for the record, yes, I do have MovableType’s internal spam system online, and I actually installed Akismet to help out with matters. However, the former is lightyears from being 100% effective, and apparently the latter has issues, so I figured a third layer of protection was warranted.
As always, if you are experiencing issues with comments or trackbacks, drop me a line at “linoge funny-little-at-symbol wallsofthecity.net”, and I will see what I can do to correct the situation.