I got sick of comment spam a few months back, so I did a half-assed job of dealing with it. I installed mt-blacklist and disabled comments on new posts, but did little or nothing about closing comments on older posts.

Since then I’ve had to spend 15-20 minutes a week deleting comment spam that slipped by mt-blacklist and got added to old entries that still had open comments.

I’d made a few false starts at turning off comments on old posts en masse in order to reduce exposure but kept stumbling over the fact that most of the solutions seemed to be for MovableType 3.x and I am still on 2.66. I finally fixed that though, by installing mt-close, which lets me close comments on all posts older than a certain number of days, which I’ve now done.

The result is that I seem to be catching a lot less comment spam and so far the only new comment has been a legitimate one. On the flip-side, I’ve seen my first bogus trackbacks, but so far, only a few.

The good news is that now I have the tools in place to make managing comment and trakcback spam managable, so I’m opening new posts for comments again and I’ll only close them when the rate of comment spam gets high enough that it takes me more than a minute or two a week to deal with it.

I’m now state-of-the-art for 2003! (if one ignores my barely customized template).