What better way to start the day* than to spend five minutes deleting the comment spam that got though my filters overnight.

Thankfully, sixteen more comments had been blocked automatically by MT-Blacklist so I didn’t even have to deal with those. Oh, and I added a robots.txt file to wabson.org, to tell Google and its friends not to index any of the CGI files on the server, which I hope will cut down on the number of spammers that get here by searching the Internet for the Movable Type’s comment scripts.

Although this should help, and although I update the filters with new keywords from any comments that get through, it’s always going to be a cat-and-mouse game between me and the spammers. But I shouldn’t really have to do this, should I?

If every morning you woke up to discover that some evil advertisers had come round the middle of the night and flyposted the front of your house, you’d be fairly annoyed, wouldn’t you? And no doubt someone would stop them, in the end. But because it’s the Internet, I guess it’s different. These people are vandalising my property on a daily basis and getting away with it.

I don’t know the legalities of comment spam, but as our legislators barely have the ability to pass a set of laws to stop the tide of email spam, expecting them to stop people from spamming my blog is perhaps a little too ambitious.

* OK, so technically I started the day by hitting snooze lots of times, getting showered and dressed, running for the bus, reading the Independent, getting into work and fiddling with Java. But this is the first productive thing I’ve done today.