If it’s not obvious by now, I’ve tightened up the spam filtering. We’re getting hammered by comment spam this last week or so — some big new round of scripts is going off.
I’m sorry if your comment is delayed, but it’s either that or TypeKey, which I don’t really want to do either. This sucks. I have to find a solution of some kind — I’m open to suggestions.
A popular spam protection mechanism I've seen on many sites is the use of security graphics. Along with the comment box, users must enter letters/numbers they see on a graphic. The characters might be in a unique font or rotated so that scripts cannot recognize them, but still readable by site users.
I wonder if there's an online service that help websites verify human input... :-) I've seen it on Yahoo (probably home-brewed) and also on updated PHPBBs.
Caveat: I'm not familiar /at all/ with running blogs or defending against spam attacks but I remembered your spam entry when I happened across OpenID, (http://openid.net/). From the website:
"This is a decentralized identity system, but one that's actually decentralized and doesn't entirely crumble if one company turns evil or goes out of business. An OpenID identity is just a URL. "
I'd followed a link to openid.net from website of a company that offers an implementation of OpenID called libopkele (http://kin.klever.net/libopkele/). How did I get there? Why, via the source of all things good(tm): the newsgroup alt.comp.freeware.
But, as I stated above, I don't know much about nothing when it comes to blogs.
best, Craig