I now have two LiveJournal "friends" (friend-ofs, really) who are transparent shills for shady credit card companies. And who delete all comments discussing their shilliness. Both get free links to their phony blogs on my userpage there.
OK, I just went into my LJ preferences and shut off the listing of friend-ofs on my userpage. I am still sad that I had to turn off a feature in order to stop spammers from exploiting it.
This is the sort of thing that would make me grumble and shrug if LJ was my sole blogging option, but now I can point to it and shout with righteous there!-you-see?-ness. Viz this post.
Speaking of spammers exploiting features, I have just shut off the need to moderate anonymous comments here, since my receipt of comment-notification email seems spotty. Grumble... shrug. (And remember that if you have an LJ account, you can use it to sign into this blog for commenting purposes.)
You see? This is why it took me forever to get comments working on my own site. And why I took down the forum on pseudocertainty. Spammers and hackers are a complete waste of my time.
My first Movable Type blog, which I ran in 2004, was a spammy disaster. Not only were there no good tools to keep spammers away, but there were no good tools to batch-delete all the spammy comments either. The spam basically killed it.
MT now boasts about its anti-spam tools. The software ships with many countermeasure plugins it didn't have before. I'm not sure how it detects spam now, but it seems to be doing a good job, and I can monitor its activity via the admin dashboard. (I have gotten no spam comments but lots of spam trackbacks on this new blog.)
So, optimistic for now.
(P.S.: Hey, cool, OpenID login seems to work.)
(P.P.S.: "1 Comments", MT? Really? Jeez.)