For the second time in a month my web hosting firm suspended my site due to the load it was putting on the server. That was caused by yet another automated comment spam attack against my site. While Movable Type (my blogging software) has some tools to deal with such spam those tools put an extra load on the server. I've been happy with the results of their MT-Blacklist spam blocker since it catches the vast majority of spam. To give you an idea of how bad the problem is here are some stats from MT-Blacklist which I installed about 9 months ago:
Comment spams blocked: 124738Comment spams moderated: 4746
So that's an average of about 400 per day but they often come in waves of thousands. And mind you I've had to deal with those 4,746 moderated comments manually. Then there are the knuckleheads who feel that my site is the place to post messages to promote their little bullshit penny stocks. So I have to spend time deleting those message and banning those people.
In short, I've had enough! Until Six Apart, the makers of Movable Type, come up with a better solution for dealing with this nonsense I've decided to turn off comments and trackbacks. I hate to do that because I value the little feedback and interactivity that the site gets but I just can't take it any more.
