After having received the first piece of Comment Spam, I started thinking about the various strategies I could put in place to fight it should things get worse. Bayesian filters, compulsory previewing, proxied links (to make the act pointless), throttling, allowing previously visited IPs only, putting the comments system into the brain of a monkey and using pavlovian techniques to train it to fight spam…
… Then it occured to me. The number one, must-have feature of any comment spam filtering system is: the ability to delete spam.
Although the delete function has been done since the comments system was created, it was never wired up to the admin interface – leaving me with undeletable spam. Doh!
It is, of course, hooked up now.