Attention commenters: Movable Type made me do it
When you get between 40 and 100 spam comments per hour and decide to take a little break to, say, sleep, and when that puts you 1,000 to 2,000 spam comments in the hole, it's time to turn off the tap.
I hate to make commenters to Click use the Typekey service, but that's pretty much all Movable Type 3.2 has to offer.
One of the best things about this blog is the comments. It's usually people helping me more than me helping them, and I appreciate it, but any way you parse it, it's helpful, entertaining and what makes blogging different than just about every form of media out there.
And I like to leave the comments wide open so anybody can participate without any registration or other arduous procedures. And I don't really care who comments or whether or not they're anonymous. Anonymous is OK.
But thousands of ads for everything from Viagra, Cialis, Tramadol (I still don't know what that is) and "soma" to every kind of porn, ringtones (probably even porn ringtones) and who knows what else, I just can't keep up. Even a "select all" button to delete comments en masse would help. But no, Movable Type makes you check each and every one (instead of deselecting the one good comment among 200 or 300 bad ones) and then delete them, during which time the server in Denver (eighth circle of Hell -- sorry Denverites -- believe me, it's not you) times out.
So to make a long story short, as a 4-year-old tugs on my sleeve (and so she should), there are many things more important than trashing thousands of junk comments a week.
Just about f'n everything.
So I apologize for the TypeKey inconvenience, and I'll hope for a better way to deal with spam comments in as near a future as there can be in MediaNews Corp. land.
Thanks everybody,
Steven