I recently switched my contact form over to the Secure and Accessible PHP Contact Form that will deter Spam. Comment spam was bad enough but I got hammered by over 50 emails in one day just from the comment form alone. All of this just drives a wedge between people who want to communicate with each other which is unfortunate. At any rate, use the new form which is at the same place.

We knew it was going to happen.. just a matter of time. Six Log got hit with some lovely Trackback spam. Wasn’t Typekey supposed to take care of blog spam? Was it not touted as the cure-all for the spam problems bloggers were having everywhere? I had been asking about turing and comment moderation for a while, but neither made it into MT and I didn’t feel compelled to spend my money on it. The hardcore MT crowd spent a lot of time talking about the Wordpress defectors, but a lot of people left because MT3 did not solve the problems that needed a solution like the spam issue.

Since I migrated my blog from MT to Wordpress, the comment spam has dried up. Perhaps Google hasn’t finished indexing my site or I’m just not drawing as much traffic as I used to. I don’t know what caused the change but I love the peace and quiet. Comment moderation seems to be quite effective. I have heard a lot of stories about Typekey has driving away comments while people are still getting comment spam. I thought Typekey was a good idea for a minute and realized it’s just going to create more work for the readers. When you make your readers work too hard, they don’t stick around. When I was using CMS software like Xoops and PostNuke, I had the same problem. The users didn’t feel like creating logins to see certain content so they didn’t. The news page got tons of hits and no one went any deeper. With precious few readers, the less work you make them do, the better.

I am going to finally let go of the elisehines.com domain this year. It expires on 3/24 and it has little use to me these days. Essentially all it does is get forwarded to justelise.org and harbor hundreds of spam e-mails per week. I doubt I’ll buy it back in the future.

Please update your e-mail addresses (change the elisehines.com to justelise.org), bookmarks and all that jazz. Thanks!

I didn’t realize how many forms spam could take until recently. I’ve had every type of spam e-mail you could think of from marketing crap to get rich quick schemes. Though you might not personally consider it spam, but pop up ads, pop under ads, and those websites you accidentally surf to when you mistype a url.. those all get lumped together with spam in my head. It’s not informational spam so much as it’s a visually invasive type of spam issue. I don’t know if that makes sense to you but that’s how I feel when I am subjected to it.

Anyway, a healthy discussion of how Elise feels about spam is not the point of this post. My blog has been subjected to comment spam, my boyfriend’s site has been subjected to comment spam, and most major blogs that I visit have been subjected to comment spam provided that they leave their comments open. This is an unfortunate situation. It’s not bad enough that I get over 100 spam e-mails a day to all of my personal accounts, but I also manage to pull in my fair share of comment spam lately. I actually banned IPs and domains because of it. The only good thing that’s come out of all of this spammy horsecrap is that the next version of Movable Type is going to have an option for registration to leave comments. Goodie gumdrops.

I also wanted to apologize for not being too commentish lately. I’ve been busy with work and school, and might have the flu right now, and Jason’s visiting in a couple of weeks… busy busy! I am also holding off on doing too much with my blog until I know more about MT 3.0. Anyway I’ll post again relatively soon.