Don’t I wish. My friend Layton tried to comment on my killer dolphin entry and got blocked by my blog comment spam blocker. Doh! If you don’t know about this, it’s the latest spam craze. Spammers as you know send out mass e-mails and get paid tiny referrals for anyone who clicks through to some cheezy site selling Viagra or something. Send out 1 million e-mails, and even if you just get 10 dummies to click the link, you get paid something.

So, the latest thing is to go to blogs, and have a tool automatically enter dummy comments with the spammer’s links in it. I’ve got some tools in my blogging software that filter out based on rules like banned URLs, banned words. I think it’s banned about 15,000 entries on my site in the last year or so. But, it gets carried away. For example, if I ban the word “sex”, the word “Essex” is banned (I think with regular expressions I could allow it if the word didn’t have a space before “sex”, but I’m not that talented!)

Anyway, the next version of the blogging software I use, MovableType, is supposed to handle this much better. I’ll try to upgrade soon and hopefully then I’ll get zero spam and everyone can enter any comment they want. Until then, if you get blocked, I apologize, and just send me your comment if you like and I’ll post it. And no, I’m not trying to censor you I just want to get rid of stupid spammers!!!!

So, without further ado, here’s Layton’s comment:

Yeah, when I was in the gulf there was a Naval
Detachment that was in charge of several trained
dolphins that patrolled the ships at various times of
the day. However, these dolphins weren’t armed, they
were only trained to look for foreign objects (mines,
bombs) that were attached to the hulls of the ships
that were inport Bahrain. They would also alert them
to any divers in the area. Pretty neat, it reminds me
of one of my favorite television shows…Flipper!
Faster than lightning, no one you see, is smarter than
he.

UPDATE: Oh, and you can put any comment on my blog as well as many other MovableType blogs (and in the future blogs run by other blogging software) just by getting a free account at Typekey. Those comments are not filtered as spammers never sign up for an account (because it’s too much work and I can block any account). This is definitely the way to go, so consider signing up today!