1 Dur?

2 Hmmm ... the spammers are targeting old posts for their comments.

Maybe freezing comments for posts over a week old would prevent this? It would also prevent some loony mission poster with a search engine from adding crap ...

3 Kristopher - Yeah, I need to fix that.

Wonderduck - Geek joke. ;)

 

4 Wasn't trying to backseat drive ... just thinking aloud ... considering options needed to make my own future blog easy to maintain.

I was considering starting a blog, but comments from other bloggers have put me off from using stuff like blogger.com.

5 I comment on old posts sometimes, but I would not shed many tears if that were stopped. Many top of the line blogs have no comments whatsoever. Indeed, as someone said, "blogosphere is my comments board".

6 Blogger sucks, or used to suck.  They've been doing a lot of work on it lately.

I'm busy writing my own blogging system, which will go live later this year.  It's pretty neat - even if it needs some better spam filtering tools. ;)

There will be both free/ad-supported and paid accounts available - the paid accounts will probably have more features available.  And I'll have a certain number of free "pro" accounts to hand out as well, so just let me know if you're interested. :)

7 I don't want to block off comments from old posts entirely, but what I may do (as soon as registration goes on-line) is require registration to comment on any posts older than, say, 14 days.

And honeypot them.  For actual users, you won't see a comment form, so you can't comment.  Spammers often just run through post numbers and hit them all in sequence - so anyone who tries to comment on a post that has comments disallowed is a spammer, and I can blacklist them automatically. Which makes me happy. :D

I enabled a simple honeypot the other day, and so far I've harvested 770 domains and 2200 IP addresses.  Blocking IPs isn't worthwhile if it takes human intervention, but we already have 25 IPs that have sent us over 100 spams each, so it's working well.  (And the spam block is very quick - a single indexed database lookup, and then increment the counter.  Enormously faster than MT Blacklist.)

8 I'm interested.

It's about time I stopped parasitizing other folks blogs ... ermmm, I meant, errrr .....

9 I'll move The Pond if you want me to, Pix ol' bean!  I might be a good guineapig duck.  After all, I'm relatively clueless when it comes to the 'behind the scenes' part of blogging, so if I can make it churn, anybody could!

10 As a Munuvian, you're automatically eligible for a free unlimited account. :)