January seems to bring them out of the woodwork–as do holiday weekends. The worms known as spammers to bloggers. Even in my newly resolved mindset of peace and harmony, I hate them.
There are many ways to combat spammers, and Typepad allows me to comment block though I mainly get them through Trackback–which I’ve turned off for the past year, but they hit the earlier ones and it’s a real pain to go through each post (2000 plus!) to reset to not accept Trackbacks.
But one way around this is the "Block Commenter" feature and with e-mail notification, I immediately delete the trackback and place the IP in the "Block" list. As we all know however, those IP’s are usually a one-time deal and it’s practically useless to use this method against robotic spam.
So I added a few words to watch out for: "buy" and "meds" were two of them. "Penis" (small and large–caps that is) has been on the list for a while. And it works!
In answering a comment by my good friend Mark, I mentioned that it took me only an hour to buy the books.
I was blocked.
Quick-fix: changed "buy" to "purchase."
The Lost Children: A Charity Anthology
Ah, your post brings back memories of 2005 (or was it 2004?) and learning to use WordPress. The tools offered in Typepad that you describe seem similar to the out-of-the-box tools included with WordPress’s basic code. It is indeed unfortunate when trackbacks must be turned off, and so much of the blogosphere today has done just that. Perhaps a consequence is there seems to be little use of them.
The many hackers that have contributed to WordPress since then, and specific to your post, the anti-spam variety of plugin, have made these spam memories mostly fade.
Still, I would imagine anyone first starting out with an independently-hosted WordPress blog would have to go through the same or similar learning process to find what works and what doesn’t work in regards thereto. It may be a process that is time consuming and/or isn’t for everyone. Just finding an adequate and reasonably priced host can be frustrating, since website hosting has become such a commodity.
Sorry if I’m raving about an alternate blogging platform, but the developers at and for WordPress rock.
I was going to go with WordPress, but the cost difference stopped me at the time. Maybe next go-round when this comes up for renewal.