Comments & Spam & Drupal oh my...

Sadly, now that it looks like I've got more than two readers, and we've gotten a actual high-falutin' Google pagerank going (woo hoo! it's currently a '2'! We've hit the big time!), we've also been getting our comments auto-spammed. Blind, automated systems try to find Drupal sites with comments turned on, and if they are successful in making a comment, it will then go on to make a whole lot more comments. With lots of links. To that fine spamming standard of 'enlargement' pills. Lovely. First time this happened it hit about 150 comments before we caught it. One easy way to stem this off that we've got available is to simply make the comments moderated, so they have to be approved prior to going live. This makes it appear to 'fail' to the blind system trying to generate the comment (for it gets stuck in the que, instead of posting to the page), so it will only make one comment, which you can easily delete, and then it will appear to leave you alone in the future.

There are several other available systems that we're researching, and I'll post about those when we've got them working. But until then, please, please post your comments, and they will go live once we've had a chance to check that it's not Spam. While the comments page should tell you this, some folks have been confused as to why their comment doesn't show up. It's not that we don't love you, we do, we just have to screen the comments now so it might take a little while for your comment to appear...