Ya know, It was an ideal life about one – or even two – years ago, when I started this site up. I just wanted someplace to quietly rant about things, in my own way, and to otherwise get my mind off work.
To that end, I wanted a way to prevent any major monitoring and/or admin work with the comment system. [I don’t believe in removing comments altogether, but I’ve thought about it multiple times!] Various methods were in place over time, but two are still in place for about a year now – Bad Behavior and (currently) Akismet (the latter *only* because I happen to have a WP account from the original LL weblog requiring a login – that got me a free API key in the deal).
Up until this week, I only had 30 comments tracked by Akismet as spam – not bad for a semi-known site. But in the past week, thanks to the prior post (and the mentioning of two little words) I’ve been inundated with another 18 comment spams over three days. This is impressive only because this is *after* Bad Behavior is preventing bots from even reaching here in the first place! And checking past articles related to Akismet, it appears to be due to their lagging behind (and in some cases, its also placing valid posts into its moderation queue).
So, I’m looking pretty hard at another service – Defensio – which, amusingly, Akismet’s own weblog introduced with a smile and a wave just this past winter. I’m also in the process of enabling OpenID and related referrals on my site, so that I can post to other sites without any major issues (Gwyneth’s site is a good example, actually). For WP that’s actually relatively simple – a couple of plugins – and off to the races. Will post on that later.
/salute
–TSK