I’ve said it before, I love MT-Blacklist. What’s become a very useful feature is that you can set it up to email you whenever someone leaves a comment. People think that if they leave spam in a really old post, it will go unnoticed. Wrong!! First of all, my Movable Type software emails me when I get a new comment, regardless of how old the post is that the comment was left on. Second of all, even without MT-Blacklist, my ten most recent comments are listed on the main screen of where I login to create posts. No comment goes unnoticed.
Just a few minutes ago, some schlepprock thought he could leave cleverly disguised spam messages with links to his porn site on my blog without me noticing. I saw after the third comment that I was getting them on old posts. I quickly added the URL he was leaving to the blacklist, and stopped all subsequent comments from this low-life.
If I didn’t get the emails, I wouldn’t have noticed, and don’t know how many comments I’d end up cleaning up in the end.
Also, the one nice thing to not getting many comments is that it’s easier to notice the spam right away. I’ve had a total of 159 comments left on my blog since I first started it almost a year ago. If I were a big guy with several hundred comments per day, a lot of spam would slip through between blacklist updates.
If you’re using Movable Type, and don’t have MT-Blacklist, I recommend giving it a try.