Dead Cant Rant

Thanks to Dr. Dave, we are now a certified spam-free blog. I got tired of my own moderation methods, involving a custom PHP script that ruthlessly deleted every comment in the database matching a (continually growing) set of criteria. Anything written with a certain keyword — say, “internet pharmacy” — was purged, even if you were writing to complain about the plethora of such comments on the web. Sorry, tough luck, save the tears for the next guy.

Unfortunately, that pretty much sucked, because I don’t want to delete legitimate comments. As you might expect, comments on the site are rare (we aren’t exactly Drudge here), but the ones we do get are very poignant: Witness Stephanie’s comment regarding the death of her cousin Jovonie Ochoa.

So I finally broke down and installed Spam Karma 2, the awesomest plugin for the awesomest publishing platform on the planet. According to my records, Spam Karma has beaten down, crushed, ground to a fine paste, and devoured over 1,000 spam comments in just the past week alone. It’s hard to believe I was deleting that many manually.

Rock on, Spam Karma!