I have spent a cumulative 6 hours in the last two days trying to find a comment spam solution. I tried 4 CAPTCHA plugins (none of which worked), rebuilt my site twice (with much pain because I have 1600 entries), an e-mail white list (which may work ok if I was willing to rebuild my blog yet another time), and an attempt at enabling Typekey authentication (failed because there appears to be an error in the hand shake script that is missing a slash mark for the location of the mt directory on my blog that I can't seem to correct because I know nothing about cgi).

Since I have gotten home tonight, I got 500 comment spam that I junked while trying to fix everything.

Unless someone else feels like fixing this for me (and I only know one person that would do it and she is way to busy), I'm done with comments and I've disabled the script. Maybe I'll get inspired one day and close the comments on all my old entries manually (not likely) and then reopen comments on new entries. But it won't happen any time soon. I guess you'll have to live in frustration at this blog turning into a one-way diatribe like it was when I started years ago.

I love this blog, but, seriously, I'm not into making web pages and I don't want to keep wasting my evenings in front of a computer after spending all day at work in front of a computer trying to fight the idiots who are ruining the Internet for the rest of us. And truly idiots they are. Some spam I get doesn't even have any sort of advertising in it (not that its ok to advertise with spam), its just a random garble with a random e-mail address and no web links. What a waste!

(Just for reference on my breaking point. I disabled trackbacks in 2005 after 6,000 junk pings, and only 10 legit ones, most of the junk was ... well.. XXX rated. I estimate since beginning with Movable Type, I've had about 1,000 legitimate comments. I currently have nearly 60,000 awaiting moderation or actually published spam comments, and probably tens of thousands more than went straight to the junk folder.)