As you may have noticed, most entries are now closed, and can’t be commented on. Here’s why.
This blog has been exceedingly crapflooded. At the point where I decided that it’s enough, there were about 1′200 comments, all submitted by bots, trying to increase the PageRank of some dubious site.
There are a few solutions to this problem:
1) turn off commenting altogether: This is what I’ve done now, until I’ve figured out a solution that is a bit more permanent and less restrictive
2) fixing Google’s PageRank system. Actually they’re working on this, and support now a tag that excludes these flood comments from influencing PageRank. I might implement this
3) Captchas: A Captcha is one of these “funny, skewed word on multicolored background” things that we can intuitively read, and computers can’t. A great way to turing-test potential commentators, or at least make comment-spamming too expensive to properly work. On the other hand, this is bad for web usability. If you’re sight impaired, the captcha may lock you out, together with the bots.
There is a Captcha plugin for MT, but officially, it’s for a higher version than I am running on this site. The officially recommended version for this captcha to work is one after MT did their license change, so I am not happy. Moreover, you need to install a few libraries for the captcha code to work; and I am fairly certain that won’t work with my provider 
So, in essence, I am working on it, but for the time being, no more comments … but keep emailing me!
In addition, I have now realized that crapflooders also use trackback pings for their purposes. I really have to sit down and hack a little solution together, probably a little custom hack, but at present, I am really busy coding at work, so I just simply don’t find the time to do so. But rest assured, I’ll do something about this.
