After several years of very little comment spam, I’ve started getting a reasonable amount, particularly on old posts. Going in and manually deleting it is getting to be a bit annoying so I’ve decided to experiment with filtering.
I’m going to start with a very simple solution and make it more and more complex as each level fails (I can see a Bayesian filter in my future).
Right now, all you have to do to comment is type in a generated number which is so ludicrously simple as to nearly not be there. It’s essentially the numerical values for the year, month and day added together; a very low pass filter, I think. Let’s see how that works.
As a bonus for those commenting near midnight, it has a leniency of +1 on the value. If you take longer than a full day to comment, then… well… tough. You can just damn well go back and get a new number.