There’s an evil bug in Safari or MoveableType that makes comment spam kind of jump into the actual post itself when you delete it. I’d started ignoring this, since it doesn’t seem to affect the actual post if you don’t save after deleting the comment. Only I guess I saved, because last week one of my posts was indeed replaced by an ad. Luckily Andrew Boaill wrote and told me so I could fix it: thank you Andrew.

Jay Allen promises to release MT-Blacklist, a new, improved, easy-to-install and spamproff anti-comment spam plugin today. This is a good thing.

Extremely frequent visitors may have noticed that link-packed comments advertising various drugs keep popping up and disappearing here. They’re always comments to posts that have a lot of links pointing to them and thereby a high Google PageRank, which is obviously what the spammer wants to get in on – links from a site with high PageRank give the linked-to site some of that PageRank. I’ve been deleting them as fast as they arrive (or as fast as I see them) and banning the IP-numbers they were sent from but these – or this – spammer is annoyingly persistent, is obviously on dialup and so has zillions of IP numbers, and it’s really boring deleting spam all the time. Fortunately Liz links to a solution to all this that lets you blacklist certain URLs, which are then never displayed in comments, though other, benign, URLs are shown. Unfortunately this solution involves three plugins, tweaking, and slower rebuilds and comment processing. Maybe I’ll just keep deleting, for now.

If linklove describes linking to lovingly spread the goodness of one’s PageRank, and linkslutting is doing anything to get other people to link to you, what is this? Linkcoercion? Attempted linktheft? I’m not going to call it linkrape. It sure ain’t rape if you can delete it and its consequences completely.