I know I’m not like some people who get 600 hits in one day from Reddit . I’ve been told that the true measure of “getting on the map” is when spammers take notice of you. They’ve noticed my blog, probably due to my incredibly massive readership. I thought I had my blog settings to moderate comments, but I was mistaken. Sorry if any of you were exposed to some of those terrible comments over the last couple of days.

My current blogging engine is Mephisto which has built-in support for Akismet . So far Akismet has taken care of the problem. I’m getting several hundred spam comments everyday, but none are getting through. None of the comments were particularly clever, but the volume is just no fun to keep track of by hand.

My university has a content filter (Dan’s Guardian) which uses blacklists as well as phrase weighting. I hadn’t thought about it before, but one drawback of using filters on the content is that when I went to remove spam comments, the comments triggered the content filter and kept me out of my own blog when I was trying to delete those very comments. Fortunately a semester ago they allowed a bypass that logged your action and let you through. Without that safety hatch I wouldn’t have been able to rectify the situation.