Well, I finally got pissed off enough about having to delete at least 15 spam comments a day to get off my duff and do something about it.

I have implemented two solutions, one that is preventative, and one that is a clean up tool for after spam is posted.

The first change I made was to rename my comments script, and then remove ALL direct links to it. I accomplished this by:

1. Removing the links from my index and date-based archives, linking instead to the comments section of the individual posts.
2. Obsfucating the comment script’s url in the comment posting form using javascript. Now, when a user hits the submit button, the script url is assembled and assigned by javascript. It’s a simple bit of code that should prevent most bots from posting comments.

Unfortunately, there are also spammers freaky enough to post spam manually, and there’s not really anything I can do to stop them. What I can do though, is make deleting their comments easier to save myself some clicks, and some time. To this end, I followed step 6 of this great post on preventing blog spam at Yoz Grahame’s Cheerleader blog. Now, when I receive an email notice that someone has posted a new comment to my blog, I also receive a direct link that lets me delete their comment with only 2 clicks. Based on some of the feedback on Yoz’s post, I also moved the delete link above the comment text in the email notice, to fix an issue with spammers leaving open html tags to obscure the link.

I hope this all works – it didn’t require a huge investment of time, and I expect it will save me a lot of frustration. I’ll post my results after a couple of weeks.

Please let me know if you encounter any issues with using the comments, beyond needing to have javascript enabled in order to post. Thanks.

I also got sick of people typing search terms in my subscription form at the top left, so I added a bit of javascript to validate the email before posting.