I haven’t had problems with comment span since I installed the Closecomments plugin but a lot of people do have problems and want to keep their comments open. For that reason Sixapart is integrating comment registration in version 3.0 of Movable Type. I was pretty uninterested in it and pretty disapointed it was the solution we had come to because I don’t really want to have to register to comment on someone’s blog.
Seems I’m not the only one because they are also rolling out Typekey as a free registration service that people can use for their own site. That way we can share the registrations and use the same ID on a bunch of blogs. Good solution. It’s yet another service I’ll have to register for though so I hope someone finds a way to aggregate all the “social software” memberships and give me a unique login.
One Comment
The first time you mentioned MTCloseComments I thought it wasn’t a practical fix for comment spam because I’ve had people Google a topic and stop by to comment on something I’ve said weeks or months later. By using this plugin I lose the opportunities of getting such feedback.
Fastforward to the present and I’ve received so much comment spam that I finally broke down and installed it today. Just the sense of knowing that I won’t get any more spam on my blog has given me a reason to breath a sigh of relief.
It may not be the best fix for comment spam, but it certainly will help and now I can understand why you did it.
My only alternative fix would be force readers to register with your blog to be able to post. That, to me, seems like a much more practical method of cutting out the spam with the minor inconvinience of asking readers to register for comments. So long as the method is simple and usable, I don’t see a problem but fook me if I know how to implement something like that.
Cheers!