Last night I was obliged, temporarily, to switch off the comments system here. This blog, and my other blog too, came under severe automated comment attack. There were several hundred comments in the space of a couple of hours. I was out late and only got home an hour into the process. All the comments have been cleared out, and a random number system has now been installed, like the one already in use for the comments at Samizdata. New comments are trickling in as per usual, so there doesn't seem to be any great problem with this.
My deepest thanks to Perry de Havilland of Samizdata, and especially to the Dissident Frogman, for their prompt and excellent assistance. First, the crisis was stemmed. Then the solution was put in place which ensures that this particular crisis can't happen again.
Another learning experience. Brian's Education continues.
Other than this, posting will almost certainly be non-existent for the rest of today.
Can you point me to where you got the code for the Turing test? I've been looking for something like this. I've avoided MT-Blacklist because that approach can not scale and will eventually fail miserably.
Chris,
The Turing code we're using here comes from http://james.seng.cc/archives/000145.html
Although rather unpolished, it's pretty straightforward to make it work. Just follow the instructions.
Also, note that part of the setup implies a little hack of MT's Comment.pm - so in case you upgrade your MT installation in the future, don't forget to hack it again.
