I’ve had to turn up the spam-sensitivity of our system to deal with all of the comment spam our site has been getting. A lot of it has been getting through and I know the contributors to the site are annoyed by it. So 24 hours ago I cranked up the spam-detector’s sensitivity level just a tiny bit (previously set to 0 out of 10, I moved it to 2) … and in reviewing the junk comments I found several legit comments for Alan Kistler’s latest article. I don’t know what the commenters did to warrant registering as spam, but clearly the sensitivity is too high.

Frankly, I’m sick of dealing with spam comments. We get 200 spam comments a day, easily, and a good portion of those slip past the filter. I am this close…okay, you can’t see me, but hold your fingers like you’re pinching salt for a recipe or stating how much talent Anna Nicole Smith has…to setting our system to “approved commenters only”. This means that anyone would be free to comment so long as they were registered with Typekey, a simple process which takes about a minute.

Honestly, I love having Typekey for comments. All I have to do is log into Typekey once a week (with cookies activated, of course) and then I don’t have to fill in my name and e-mail every time I want to comment. That alone is reason enough for most of you to go get a Typekey I.D. The beauty of going to Typekey-only is that I could turn off the notification system and stop spending time approving comments every day…and the users would all see their comments appear instantaneously, which would put an end to the duplicate comments that I get about once a week from someone who thinks their comments didn’t go through.

The only thing against doing this, of course, is that some people won’t do it. Either they just don’t want to have to register for yet another thing on the Internet, which I totally understand, or they are paranoid about any one of a few dozen conspiracies about registering. I suspect it’s mostly the former, as the amount of “anonymous” e-mail from bogus names and e-mails is pretty low. I just hate to do anything which will inhibit comments, since we thrive on them as our only form of remuneration for what we do…but this spam thing has reached my critical mass point.

The only alternative is one of those Goshorful plugins for a “code that the computers can’t read” that you have to retype before submitting, and I hate those even more than I hate constant political ads on TV! Because 9 times out of 10 I can’t read those codes either! You get a too-tiny rectangle with some skinny orange sans serif letters set against a plaid background with scratches across it, trying to make out whether the V is lowercase or uppercase or whether this line is a capital I, a lowercase l or a lowercase j.

Who needs that? Does anyone really want me to institute THAT over the simplicity and efficiency of a Typekey-only policy?

I need you all to sound off here. Where do you stand? For the moment, comments are still wide open, so speak up. I’m listening, Seattle.

UPDATE!
Your feedback so far makes it clear that I have TOTALLY neglected to inform you of one vital bit of information:

E-mail addresses can NOT be gleaned from our comments. Moveable Type encrypts e-mail addresses within the system so that they can display but cannot be read by spam robots. Your e-mail addresses are protected.

And I shouldn’t need to even say this, but neither Monitor Duty nor Typekey/Sixapart are going to use your e-mail addresses for spam.

As for the people who want us all to go to typing in a frustrating passcode every time we want to comment, even if we already have an easy-to-use and hard-to-spam Typekey account, it ain’t going to happen. I will shut down the site, burn the backup disks, kill my pets and vote for the Green Party before I do that.