Comments Currently Disabled

Published on 13 February 2008 in , , , ,

An observant person might notice that comments on this blog are currently turned off.

There’s a very good reason for this – today I logged into Movable Type and found that over the last few days, 44 spam comments had somehow gone live on the site.

Now this isn’t the first time this has happened – something similar occurred last week. And it’s all frankly rather worrying because I have Movable Type set up not to publish any post without me approving it.

Looking at the Activity Log hasn’t helped me – they’re not appearing in there. I took a fresh look at the “Manage Comments” screen to see if there was some easy way that user error could be creeping in, and I was the source of the problem by clicking on some wrong button.

I could find none.

Then I had another problem. My attempts to close comments on all entries just wouldn’t work properly – the comment box went from pages where no comments had been made, but stayed fast on entries where comments had. In the end I had to go into the code and physically remove the form from the Movable Type template before they would disappear.

Frankly I’m rather concerned by all this. Actually that’s an understatement. I’m VERY concerned about this. Like most bloggers, I don’t want spammer abusing my site for their own causes. This is my space and I won’t have it hijacked. Comments will be back at some point. But it’s clear that something is not as robust as it could be and as such, they’ll be switched off until I’ve found some way round it, or tracked down the issue.

In the meantime, the email form works as normal. Don’t hesitate to get in touch – it’s always nice to hear from nice people!