How I Shrank the Blog Spam

Many ISPs, including mine, are having major problems with comment spam straining their servers. I can report that two simple fixes have blocked a HUGE fraction of my MT 2.6x comment spam: closed comments on all posts more than a month old, using the close comments plugin, and I rewrote my comment templates to require users to preview comments once before posting. Combined with my usual MT-Blackllist list, the results are dramatic. Not 100% blockage, but at least 97% of the stuff that used to get through isn't. And much of what remains is weird spam — links to non-existent web sites … which I presume are being groomed for sale once they get high googleranks. (And lots of these are in the .de TLD for some odd reason.)