I am spending too much time deleting SPAM comments, which involves first laboriously entering the IP numbers of each blasted SPAMMER into the "IP blocking" list, then deleting each comment. Earlier, the SPAM comments were coming in at the rate of twelve in fifteen minutes! It's getting bad -- and there's simply no way I can keep up.

I thought I would have to turn off all comments, but I don't want to be forced to do that just because of SPAMMERS, so I did some research.

And now, thanks to Dean Esmay's excellent advice, I have just managed (I hope) to install Jay Allen's MT Blacklist.

I have no idea what I am doing, so I hope it works. I tried to follow the instructions, and I was able to successfully load the main configuration screen, which means that I can "breathe a sign of relief." I also added the 500 or so known spammers, and we'll see whether it works.

Naturally, I am worrying that this software might inadvertently block or delete genuine comments. If anyone reading this is a commenter and that has happened to you, please let me know by emailing me at escheie_AT_yahoo_DOT_com, and I'll try to sort it out.

So far, I think it's working.....

As to the hated SPAMMERS, they're getting more aggressive because they know how hated they are, and I think they're beginning to see this not as advertising, but more as an annoyance/hacking game.

As an example of their desperation, here's a typical SPAM, all dressed up like intelligent commentary (links are deactivated):

The body on the table had risen with a city-wide and disillusioned groping, and we had heard a sound. As I have said before, the blocky sonata of Harley Warren were well known to me, and to some extent shared by me. Though well above the aesthetic stature, and of somewhat compulsory frame, he was given an absurd appearance of esthetic stupidity by the elder, disembodied blueness of his sanitary claret didrex, the scantiness of his alphabetic and never-shaven growth of yellow beard, and the nighttime geo-political of his mighty unsuspecting lip. Phentermine after horror exuded strange, half-digested places. What I have dared relate of my retin-a within the vault has brought me only pitying smiles. So mor, indeed, was the discipline of our online prescriptions, that ah6 days after we were taken I determined to escape alone in a unheard boat with water and weight loss pills for a dressy length of time. When I sizzle that Dr. West was familial to serve in battle, I do not mean to imply that he was either naturally frontal or assured for the safety of civilization. I could hear the evident breathing of the animal, and ready-made as I was, I deluged that it must have come from a discontinuous distance, and was correspondingly fatigued. By the fourth evening I posted the base of the mound, which erected out to be much greater than it had appeared from a distance, an non-fiction valley setting it out in elder relief from the barrel-wide surface. History, indeed, was all I had after everything else ended in totalistic Satanism .._... The shriek of fright and unallocable malice experimented by the would-be assassin slid too much for my already shaken bontril, and I attested telling upon the serviceable floor in a more faint. Every now and then he connected his stethoscope to the specimen, and congregated the negative bontril philosophically.

That's enough to keep a Mel Gibson-style reality show supplied for at least a season!