And so it begins. What an unfortunate turn of events. One of my favorite things about the blogging world is the trust, but how many times do you have to be spammed before you take even more extreme measures than the ones you've suggested? I think something similar is going to be the death of Trackback and Pingback as well, which is sad because both are such wonderful technologies.

Oh my, God! I just posted an entry about this slimeball company that's spamming referrer logs. One of the commenters said:

"Sooner or later, some bottom-feeding slimeball will work out a way of spamming Moveable Type comments :(

Can we class spamming as terrorism, and send a few tomahawk cruise missles to spammer's trailer parks?"

AAARRRGH!

Yes, I have, Promo...both the advertising kind, plus the same group of idiots leaving a large number of rude and obnoxious comments.

Back when I started my blog, almost a year ago, I ranted about a certain video rental chain (which shall go unnamed so that the Evil Google Trolls don't find you here). I was pissed because I had returned the movies, but was accused by the store not once, but TWICE of not returning them. They were threatening to charge my credit card and all. Once I can see...we all make mistakes...but TWICE??? After I thought I had settled the matter?

Anyway, flash forward to October 2002. I have long since stopped patronizing said video store. However, I was suddenly flooded with rude comments about that rant...most of them filled with obscenities, personal attacks, you name it. I deleted them almost as quickly as they came in, banned IP's, but they still kept coming.

Most of them seemed to come from teenagers who work for Unnamed Video Chain, and if that is the way they like to treat people, there's another good reason to not patronize them anymore!

I noticed that most of the traffic from the trolls was only going to the individual entry page, and none of them were reading the rest of my site. So I simply deleted that entry, and have not heard a peep out of them since.

I'm not crazy about the idea of having to register to comment, but I know of a few people that have already implemented it, and yes, I did register. And I would register to comment here, too.

I'm just sorry that it has to come to this. :-(

Promo and I have discussed this by email, but in case anyone else is interested:

i have an archived entry from last april (about a female news personality) that still gets several comments a day, mostly obscene ones that I have to delete. I can only assume that it's perverts searching on her name and finding my archives. It's extremely annoying. anyway, here's the fix i'm going to try and implement:

try modifying your archive templates so they list existing comments but dont allow posting new comments once the entry is off your main page. not enough people read your archives to make new comments there worthwhile anyway. if you restrict commenting to the main page, deleting unwanted comments is at least more easily managed.

promo pointed out, however, that if someone figures out how to have a spambot log comments straight into your MT executables, and bypass the commenting form, this may not work.

i'm going to try it with my blog and see what happens.

I think this may describe what happened to you: http://philringnalda.com/archives/002371.php