I’ve grown extremely tired of these ass-hat comment spammers who have nothing better to do than deface websites with ads for their ridiculous ‘products’ and pr0n sites. I took the entire comments system down a while back as a stopgap, but I didn’t like not having it. So I re-enabled comments and wrote a couple of Ruby scripts to help me manage them. I have one script that finds all the comment files and sorts them so I can see if any have changed. If any have, I run another script that lets me edit/delete any comment files. This works, but requires me to diligently check for new crap, so it’s sub-optimal.

Tired of fighting, but still wanting my comment system enabled, I put my Perl hat back on and hacked in a moderation system to the comments. Essentially, no comment will actually show up on the site until I bless it, and I’ve changed the ‘thanks’ page when someone adds a comment alerting them to the change. So comments may be delayed, but they probably won’t be. I’m pretty good about checking, but now I don’t have to check constantly to make sure I’m not involuntarily pimping for some pr0n site. I think this will work nicely.