Several people have had problems commenting recently. I’m guessing that the issue is that I recently added the word “Successful” to my blacklist, because I was getting so much spam from malicious morons using that as a user name. Unfortunately, WordPress doesn’t distinguish between strings from user names and content, so that was probably the problem that commenters were having. I’ve removed it, and we’ll see if that solves the problem. Unfortunately, it will recreate the problem with my moron spammers.
As an aside, I have to say that I’m very unhappy with WordPress’ inherent comment-spam-blocking system. It seems to me that multiple comments to multiple posts from the same IP in a few minutes should be automatically blocked, or at least held, but it doesn’t seem smart enough to do even that. MT, for all its flaws, could do that years ago. I have to look into a better solution.
I hate to go to a captcha system, but that may be the only solution. I’ve always wanted to make commenting here relatively painless, but apparently the spammers are going to ruin it for the rest of us, as they have with email.
[Monday morning update]
OK, per advice in comments, I’ve added the WP-Spamfree plugin. We’ll see how it goes.
