Comment spam sucks.

Yesterday I received the following email from my host, DreamHost.

Hello,

I'm very sorry but I had to disable comments for ericalucci.com. This file was being hit by a spammer and so it was causing a very high load on the server. Please do not rename the file back until you can install an anti-spam plugin from MovableType.

Thanks!
The super nice, helpful person in customer support

Of course, this is hugely annoying to me. Comment spam has been a pain in my side for years now. I've been running SpamLookup for years. A few months ago, I started using Akismet and was quite pleased with the benefits. The spam being published to my site was significantly reduced. I thought all was well.

This note makes me believe that DreamHost wants me to do even more. They're complaining about the load on the server (which I'm paying for thank you very much). It makes me believe they want me to do something about spammers hitting their server. Hmm, what exactly am I supposed to do about that? I can't help the traffic. I can only deal with it when it gets to me.

Six Apart has a good article on ways to defend against comment spam. There are definitely a few more plugins I can try using. If any of you have suggestions for me, I'd totally appreciate it. Send me an email since you currently can't leave a comment.

*Update* Comments are turned back on...I've installed a couple other things that should help fight spam. We'll see if it makes DreamHost happy or not.

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