The honors keep flowing in for me. I've just received my first "Comment Spam". Like the referral spam I talked about a week ago, comment spam is also frequented by the porn sites and lovers of the little, blue miracle pill. "Commenting" on my post about Activision caving on their exclusive demo release of Call of Duty from back on August 29, 2003, the spam encouraged me to keep up the great work on the site while adding a link to an impotence site.
Sheesh, guys, I can take a hint...
Little do they know that just a few hours earlier, I upgraded my Movable Type installation to the latest release version of 2.661. This new version is a stepping stone to 3.0 that was released to address (drum roll, please): comment spam! Among the improvements are the ability to close comments on a post (which keeps posted comments displayed while disabling new comments) as well as using redirects for all URLs used when posting comments. The redirects effectively eliminate the Google page rank increase since the link does not go directly to the site, rather it's redirected to the target site by a script from one of my pages.
I was going to check out the MT blacklist plugin hoping that it would keep me from having to change my comment options from open to approve (since I know all 6 of the posters that have made comments up to this point might revolt at such a change in operating procedure). But, I see that apparently the plugin doesn't play nicely with the aforementioned Movable Type upgrade. Guess I'll have to wait for now.