Not a comment spammer honest ;-)

If you are having problems why not have an RSS feed of pending comments and allow or deny them based on how relevent they are to the site.

A little note on the site saying there will be a delay between your comment being posted and it showing on the site due to manual filtering will mean that only people who have something to add to your comments will bother.

It's going to be a pain but it will only be for a few months until these dweebs learn that google has their number.

cheers
sparkes

Not a bad idea, but it violates my underlying motivation here, which is that I want to be a blogger, not a hacker.

Technical details aside, if there was an easy switch to flip in MT that would allow me to moderate the comments (which is the idea underlying your suggestion) I'd flip it in a moment. Does such a switch exist?

Sadly, no moderation built-in for current MT. V3.0 (currently in beta testing) will have moderation and/or required registration options, but your previous entry mentioned your reluctance to upgrade (admittedly, that was within the 2.x series and then only to allow you to add a patch).

The discussion you mentioned in your original entry does have another workaround that adds a hurdle: simply get rid of the "post" button. It'll force a query-response situation on the spammer. While I'm sure they'll eventually get around that, too, it should stave off your spammers until 3.0 goes final and you can take the time to upgrade to it.

Have you tried MT-Blacklist. It made a huge difference for me. Once the spammers get through, theres a one-click 'delete this comment, rebuild everything & update the blacklist with keywords to block it'. It's very nice.