As you guys know, the blog experiences waves of spam, and in the past, I've deleted spam as it appears, until it just gets to be too much, and then I shut off the comments for a while, and when I turn it back on, the spam has generally subsided because the spam robots have noticed that I'm not accepting comments anymore, and they move on to harass other innocent people. Well, I've recently learned that Moveable Type has a feature that allows me to approve commenters before their comments appear on the site. Once you've been approved the first time, then all of your following comments will be accepted. The advantage of this approach (as opposed to a function like the word recognition/validation tool common on blogger etc.) is that a commenter only has to be approved once.

Well, this solves the problem of not wanting offensive spam to appear on the site even temporarily, but I still have to delete the pending, unapproved comments regularly, which is a headache I'm willing to deal with in order to keep the comments open 100% of the time.

However, the spam robots are apparently not coded to recognize when their spam is not accepted or actually appearing on the site, so they just keep sending me bogus comments (I suppose this is where the blogger strategy works better).

There's one spammer that is particularly regular in its attacks. Everyday I get four spam comments over a four minute period, one comment per minute, always posted to my entry of October 26, 2005. This has been going on for more than a week now.

But today I waited in ambush until the first comment came in and then quickly closed the comments while I published this entry. I decided that although I believe strongly in not restricting comments, a few minutes might be worth it to rid myself of this constant annoyance.

Anyway, thanks for all of the comments and sorry if you wanted to comment and could not temporarily (especially Amy who I know was posting her last comment as all of this was happening). If you are reading this, then the comments should be back on, and hopefully the spammer has been twarted.