MovableType, the back end of this site, has been brought to its knees by the recent onslaught of the next generation of ferocious comment spam. Fearless leader Matt, our bulwark against the bloodthirsty tide, has installed a few new plugins that should help combat the hordes of savage spam. One of these plugins will, by this time tomorrow, have locked out the ability to post comments on all entries greater than a month old. If you have the desire to comment on something older, post a comment to a newer function and include a link to the older one.
If you try to post something and your comment is denied for some reason, or if it simply doesn’t show up, shoot me an email. The second filter adaptively quantifies the spam-i-ness of a comment, and it’s possible that legitimate comments will be erroneously classified as junk and not published. I can correct that from the backend – your comment is there, just not posted.
Lastly, if you post the same comment twice (as spam bots tend to do), within an hour or two the duplicates should be gone.
It’s all very exciting. Locking out 1750 of my nearly 1800 entries should have the effect of reducing the spam comments that have to be handled by the server by about 95%. It should keep the site (and my interface to the back of it) from hosing up so often.
Just so you know, I’ve gotten 5330 legit comments on this site since it opened for business in Fall of 2002. In the last two days, I’ve gotten 3776 non-published spam comments. While those comments don’t show up to the site, every single one of them has to be accepted by the server, processed, classified, posted, and eventually deleted. That computing leads to the latency that we experience. Hopefully as the old comments are locked out, that will drop significantly.
Words 
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