Not that I expected the world to sit up and take notice of “MM.net”:http://michaelmontgomery.net/, one of 10,000 blogs that are started _every day_, but I was ill-prepared for the disgusting phenomenon called “Comment Spam”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blog_spam.

Thankfully, “Textpattern”:http://www.textpattern.com/ easily allows all proposed comments to be moderated, before they’re posted on your site. And thankfully, I clicked the box under the ??Admin>Preferences?? tab that says “moderate comments.”

So I checked the ??Content>Comments?? tab for any comments that were awaiting approval, and … well, _ick_. All of the comments were spam, except for the default one that’s created when you install TxP.

Not just advertisements or links to products or services, I’m talking about — just gross stuff.

As “Adam”:http://kalsey.com/2003/11/comment_spam_manifesto/ says, “*Spammers are hereby put on notice. Your comments are not welcome.*”

In response to this problem, “Six Apart”:http://www.sixapart.com/ has a “guide”:http://www.sixapart.com/pronet/comment_spam for combatting it.

And “WordPress”:http://wordpress.org/ has a bunch of “plugins”:http://codex.wordpress.org/Plugins/Spam_Tools.

The ever-reliable “Zem”:http://thresholdstate.com/ (administrator on the TxP support site) has produced the “zem_prblock”:http://thresholdstate.com/articles/3741/pr-block-documentation plugin, and “Matthew Pennell”:http://www.thewatchmakerproject.com/journal/141/killing-comment-spam-in-textpattern and “John See”:http://www.johnsee.net/journal/265/ have apparently done great work to defeat this problem. I will try some of their techniques and describe the results.

Too bad all this has become necessary.