The comment spam is out of control.
This weblog is being bombarded at the rate of six comment spams per hour. These aren't ordinary comment spams. They're strange comment spams disguised as innocuous remarks from strangers praising this weblog. As much as I'd love to believe that 120+ people are discovering foldedspace every day, and heaping praise upon it, I'm fairly certain these comments are designed to corrupt the blacklist with which I normally weed out spam.
I've spent the last four hours closing the entries that were open for comment. Only a handful of entries remain open for discussion.
If this doesn't stem the tide, I'm going to have to take an even more drastic measure. I'll leave my hosted weblogs as they are, but move my own weblog to a new version of Movable Type, one with built-in security features. The biggest drawback of this will be that readers will need to login to comment. I hate this, too, but it may be a necessary measure.
If I do have to make this move, I'll likely do something even more drastic: start the weblog from scratch. I'll move certain weblog entries over wholesale (for example: pocket bikes and get rich slowly), but most of the others will disappear. I'll take the best of these (the ones in which I tell stories, etc.) and bring them forward as new posts — a sort of gradual "best of foldedspace".
On this day at foldedspace.org
2004 — World Views During my freshman year of college, all students were required to take a seminar called World Views, a semester-long course intended to introduce us to the mindset of a particular group of people during a particular era.
2003 — Groggy In which I take a nap and wake up groggy.
2002 — Legion of Bugs The Legion of Bugs lived in an abandoned anthill somewhere in rural America. The humans around them had no conception of just how many times these powerful insects had saved the world from complete destruction.
2001 — Yurting Kris and I spent the weekend at Champoeg Park with Mac and Pam. We stayed in a Yurt, and spent all of our time playing games.
You are not alone, Jd ... Joel and I opted to close the comment section for many of our entries this September when daily deleting sessions became too much. Now, our audience can only comment on entries that are a month or so old ... As you know, it worked to rid us of nasty spam comments, but the trackback ping world quickly flooded over with messiness ... Ugh.