Angie McKaig - E-Business Consultant and Entrepreneur

i miss the days when spam was lunch meat2005.01.07

Not that I ever ate the stuff - erg - but really, you have to feel for the poor company who makes Spam. As though there weren't enough negative perceptions towards their product, the digital revolution had to happen and now everyone's talking about Spam; spammers are considered the lowest functioning organism in the human chain.

Or, wait, maybe that's just me.

Anyway, the last six months saw a tremendous increase in the amount of comment spam (because, you know, email spam was simply not good enough, you have to be spammed EVERYWHERE). It got to the point where I was deleting upwards of 50-100 comment spams every day. I'm sure there's a lot of folks out there who laugh at these puny numbers, but it was enough to aggravate the living hell out of me.

I had meant to upgrade and install smart things and fix everything, but kept thinking "I don't have time for this." Until, of course, I was spending more time every day deleting spams than I would have spent installing and upgrading.

So I bit down and got it done - upgrading to version 3.121 of MT and installing MT-Blacklist 2.01b (they're up to 2.04 already, but I'll catch up this weekend).

Wowza, what a difference. I wasn't sure how well the Blacklist plugin would work, but it stopped 100 comment spams in two days. And then - even better - started decreasing the spams I received. I guess the losers just started to give up on me, with so many other ripe sites still out there.

To date (it's been about a month), Blacklist has stopped over 800 comment spams, and moderated another 40 or so. It's performed above and beyond my expectations. I would kiss Jay Allen personally if I could, just for saving my sanity.

If you have MT but not all the sprinkles and you're sitting on the fence about this program, I recommend it highly. With shiny gold stars and everything.

Update, January 9:
Kasia shares the result of an experiment with undeleted comment spam. The result? Spammers search Google caches for vulnerable sites. Just another reason to get MT-Blacklist!

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