Annoying spammers

I need to go update the templates of the comment posts to note this as well (or I need to finally find the time to switch over to WordPress and see if its anti-spam plugins can handle these things any better). Every MT journal out there apparently just gets hammered with spam, including mine, to the tune of often several hundred attempts a day. When one of them gets through, it's a fair bit of work to clean up after it, so I've gotten fairly aggressive about banning things that turn up in comment spam.

Unfortunately, MT sometimes only matches against portions of URLs and sometimes matches against the full body text using an algorithm that I don't understand, so some of my anti-spam blocks prevent legitimate comments. If this happens to you, please know that it's nothing personal; drop me a line and I'll fix it right away.

Hopefully this problem will largely go away with an upgrade to WordPress, where I can use anti-spam plugins that will instead, if they're not sure about a post, make people play the "guess the hazy letters in this image" game rather than just blocking things outright. (I expect that these are also available for MT now, but I can't upgrade the version of MT I'm using without paying for it due to the license change, and after thinking about it for a while, I've decided I'd rather use a fully free software package instead of Six Apart's pseudo-open commercial package.)