movable type and spam removal

Install Movable Type 3.1. It makes it a lot easier.

check your moderation settings, you can stop them from showing up.

3.1 makes it as easy as clicking one button to add something to the blacklist. And the blacklist isn't IP-based, either, because that's useless. I'm going back to MT soon for this very reason -- once I started getting comment spam on Wordpress, it never relented even a little bit no matter what I did. The only way to keep if off my blog was to moderate all comments, which is a poor comprimise. But what am I gonna do? I have less than a couple hundred entries all told, and I get 30-40 pieces of comment spam a day. More than regular email spam now. It's really a disaster.

oops, i tried to upgrade to 3.1, and it didnt really work, and i appear to have locked myself out of my mt configuration. where is stevem?

One good tip that applies to both MT and Wordpress: don't use default templates, and hack your installation slightly to change the filenames of the comment scripts - if possible, change the filename completely so that a bot couldn't guess that it's a comment script just from the filename. If you want to get really in-depth, hack the field names on the comments form.

(if I was ever writing an anti-spam blog thing myself, I'd have a generated comments form that changes the field names on each run, even.)

for some reason I was reading gareth's original post as wordpress, not MT. I just installed a plugin on wordpress that works a dream: http://mookitty.co.uk/devblog/category/kittens-spaminator/

the only problem with installing MT 3.1 is if you've got more than one user on the blog -- you need to pay for the other users [even if there's one more], which kinda blows.