UPDATE - Mar 26: I received confirmation from TypePad that they are experiencing a problem with comment spam:
Thanks for your note. We are currently working on a known issue with comment spam, and we will have this rectified very soon. We apologize for any inconvenience that this may cause!
Hopefully they will have this fixed soon.
Unfortunately, I have had to move this blog to moderating all comments, which I really did not want to do. I like having unmoderated comments because: 1) the comments appear quickly; and 2) there's no interaction required on my part for the comments to appear.
I've been running the blog this way for a couple of years now - with just requiring a CAPTCHA to defeat automatic comment spam bots - but for whatever reason that approach is no longer working! Within the last day alone, I've had about a dozen spam comments get through the CAPTCHA and wind up being posted on the site. I don't know if some spammer out there has figured out an automated way to defeat the CAPTCHA that TypePad is currently using, or if they are paying actual people to answer the CAPTCHAs so that the posts are posted, but whatever the case I'm sick and tired of both having the vile stuff on my web site and also in dealing with reporting the spam and getting it off my site.
It's strange to me, because it's only this DisruptiveConversations.com site and not my other sites that are also hosted here on TypePad (at least not yet, anyway). I'm just tired of this:
So I'm still going to require the CAPTCHA, but I'm also going to moderate all comments.
I'm going to keep monitoring the flow of comment spam and perhaps at some point soon I can turn off moderation and let the comments just start flowing again.
If anyone else at TypePad is having this problem recently, I'd love to hear about it. Please do leave a comment and I'll approve it as soon as I can. Thanks.
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Technorati Tags: typepad, blogging, spam, commentspam, blogspam, blogcommentspam
