If you comment on entries on this blog – and I welcome that very much – you will from now on see a new feature: Before you post your comment, you have to type a word in a field below, a so-called captcha phrase. The point is to exclude all automated spam. If this works, it will no longer be necessary for me to moderate all comments to avoid spam slipping through. The debate will benefit when legitimate comments can be published immediately.
Please let me know if you experience problems when posting comments.
(For MovableType users: I have installed the plugin Comment Challenge to accomplish this.)
OK, if this works I’m strongly tempted to install it on my own MT blog. :-)
Yes, I’ll monitor for a while and return to it when I have some more experience with it. Now all the comments without the captcha phrase end up in the junk folder in MT. But you can choose to just deny or throttle those comments instead. In theory you should then be rid of the whole problem.