Spam Claims Another Victim

unbillable hours

I have just learned that TPB has shut down comments on his site, after Ernie the Attorney did the same. TPB states

You know, I hate to do this, but I was just comment spammed over thirty times in the past ten minutes. It fills up my inbox, it distracts me, and it forces me to go post-to-post, deleting comments and blocking IP addresses. Ernie the Attorney responded to this by blocking comments on his site, and I think I may have to do the same.

I agree that this is a real shame, since one of the prime attractions of a weblog is the interaction between readers and writers. I hope that TPB and Ernie have called this situation to the the attention of Six Apart, the makers of both TypePad and Movable Type. As an interim measure, Movable Type users can install a copy of the MT Blacklist plugin, and I would have thought there might be something similar for TypePad. The next iteration of Movable Type (3.0) is supposed to include a somewhat controversial comment registration system designed to deal with spam. From the note of desperation in TPB's post, it sounds as though he might well be willing to trade off the potential inconvenience and loss of anonymity of a comment registration system in order to retain the comment feature without subjecting himself to a flood of spam.

Note: A quick check suggests that Ernie the Attorney, like TPB, is still allowing comments for some posts.