In the next few weeks, I’m going to upgrade to WordPress version 2.5; my target date is over Memorial Day weekend so monoblogue may be out of service during that time.
In the meantime, some motherf—er has written a program that defeats my word verification so I’m being besieged by spam comments about online poker, blackjack, casinos, etc. Today I came home to find 1400+ in my moderation queue, so if you commented legitimately and it ended up in my spam queue to be deleted, I apologize. I’m not sifting through all those comments. There were two legitimate ones that were in the proper queue and they made it through.
To that end, I’m temporarily requiring registration to comment again. Since I’m going to upgrade in the next few weeks, hopefully I can simultaneously find a different word verification program that is a little more spam-proof – if I’m real lucky it will work with my current version so I can get back to normal with comments. So bear with me as I attempt to stem the tide of crap I have to deal with.
It’s one of those days I’d love to have a worm program that runs to the source of these spam comments and just trashes that computer. Something tells me that there’s a thousand other folks out there who use the same word verification program as I who are dealing with this too.
Later tonight I’ll actually have a brief political post – I just turned on the computer after getting home and taking my regular walk and was chagrined to find the ever-expanding spam comment queue. So pardon my indulgence.
Late edit: I’ve found a plug-in that’s supposed to be compatible up to WordPress 2.5.1 (the latest version) so when I return from my meeting tonight I’ll see how it worked! If it cuts down my spam I’ll eliminate the requirement for registration.
Update 2: I have lifted the restrictions as the new program worked! It’s called WP-SpamFree version 1.8 and if you have a WordPress blog you can get it here. I even chipped in a bit to help them out.
