Don't Back Down

Man, don't know if everyone's been seeing the same thing, but I've been receiving way more comment spam than I had at any point in recent memory. Today even saw a few different folks take a stab at it. I don't really think that it's MT-Moderate - the little plugin that could really doesn't do that much, and is completely useless on entries less than 7 days old.

Does that tell us anything? Maybe. Since I've been paying attention, it seems like most of my comment spam would probably be defeated even if I was only excluding entries over three months old. Only two of the last 40 or so comments I've received that contain spam are even from this calendar year! One of those just happened to be an entry that was quite old (almost exactly a year), but had a comment approved recently. Less than two days, in fact. So it was approved, too. In response, I changed the filter on MT-Moderate to only allow automatic approval if the most recently approved comment was less than 1 day old. Nothing else has come through - but to be fair, nothing else has been excluded by that filter, either.

So just why are these comment spammers after old entries? While I've seen a couple of entries that have decent Google ranks, many of the pages getting hit just aren't that popular - or at least, I don't know that they are popular. Perhaps I should do some more searching to find out that answer. In any case, it seems like most newer entries simply aren't of interest, at least not here. For me, that makes something like MT-Moderate work well. I'd be interested to hear if it works (and how well it works) on your sites. It's not that I doubt the prowess of MT-Blacklist. Far from it, in fact. Jay has done a remarkable job. But I'm wondering if we're perhaps going too far in the battle, when a simpler tool might do the job?

MT-Moderate Update: 77 spam comments blocked out of 78 (.987)!