Spam, Spam, Spam, Egg, And Spam

This evening I had to install some code to block automated spammers.  This may affect you if you are using software that blocks Javascript, as that is now required for commenting.

I wish that step was not necessary, but to give you a sense of the scale of the problem, Wizbang has received over 100,000 spam comments (which were automatically junked) since Christmas Day.  Unfortunately most blogging systems are setup to deal with spam comments by junking the comment after submission.  For a site of this size, that’s not the optimal solution – we need to block as many of those automated bot comments before they are submitted.  We had such a system before the upgrade, but it was tied to the old version of the site software.