‘Tis the Season for Comment Spam

I left for California very early Monday morning. Since then, I got hit by hundreds of automated comment spams, including an incredible 225 on a single blog post (on why Wikipedia will fail in 5 years) in a 3 day period. I’m pretty frustrated that Movable Type appears to do little or nothing to control the automated submissions; it seems like it would be pretty easy for Movable Type to figure out that a comment spammer is in action. In any case, I’ve had to put “shields up” on comments to fend off the spammers. Sorry for the extra hassle.

One more thing while I’m grousing about blog spam. Movable Type also appears to do little or nothing to control referral spam. I’ve never fully understand the value of referral spam, but I get a fair amount of it. It’s annoying because it distorts my statistics. It would be great if Movable Type gave me a tool to let me designate something as referral spam, at which point Movable Type would completely ignore the referral from all of my statistics now and in the future.