Subtitled: woot, no spam!
So spam was getting kind of silly. Akismet was not catching, well, anything.
Enter the new MT4 options.
The behavior now is that when you first visit an entry, no comment form will display at all, leaving instead a greeting giving the option to sign in/register or to comment without registering (the default language is “anonymously” but I think that’s confusing as I require a name and email address). Clicking the sign in option brings you to another page allowing sign ins using any of the Six Apart services (TypeKey, Live Journa, Vox), OpenID, or the new Movable Type native registration. That last option lets me log in with the same account I use to publish the blog, and lets anyone register with the blog, passing a captcha and a click through from an email to verify the email address. That’s a good option for friends and family who might want to comment, but most random people will prefer not to bother registration.
For those people, clicking the “comment without registering” brings up the comment form with the addition of a captcha (which you won’t have to bother with using any of the above methods). In theory anyway, this proves you are not a spam bot, or are at least you’re one that’s taking a little bit of effort. The reason I don’t simply display this version to begin with is that the captcha display causes a request a cgi script and there’s really no reason to trigger that unless you are actually going to comment.
Anyway, no spam so far. Unless I just jinxed it…
