Unfortunately, effective immediately, I’ve had to increase the level of comment moderation due to a spam attack that’s been underway nearly 24 hours. First-time commenters now must have their comments approved before they’ll appear on this site; anyone who’s previously posted will be able to comment as normal.

Previously, I’ve had periodic spam attacks—in which spammers place “comments” intended to drive traffic to their own site(s). Those earlier attacks always tripped the spam filters on my site, but the latest attacks got around the filters. I got sick of marking them as spam and deleting them, generally at least once an hour.

So, thanks to spammers, I’ve been forced to make commenting a little more difficult. I really am sorry for the inconvenience, but I had no choice.

Update 25/10/08: I received a lot of suggestions (thanks everyone!), but unfortunately, I couldn’t make any of them work. Then Mark from Slap Upside The Head left a comment and made a suggestion I couldn’t follow up on at the the time (and my reply details that, along with my general frustration). I’m pleased to report that with Akismet running, I haven’t had to manually delete a single spam comment—it’s caught them all (12 since I installed it late last night). That’s out of a total of 93 spam comments, most of which either I or the low-level filter had already caught.

But I’m wondering: Is WordPress uniquely vulnerable for some reason, or does Blogger just take care of this behind the scenes? In any event, so far the tighter security is working, so I can get back to things that are far more interesting—like trying to figure out how to pronounce “Akismet”.