For the most part, blog comments have turned into a distributed link farm for perscription drug and porn websites. Instead of a vibrant community of ideas, about half the comments on my blog are a steady stream of Viagra, Propecia and Phentermine ads.
I’ve had enough of this crap.
Instead of disabling comments altogether, I have disabled HTML and URL auto-linking. I also updated my Individual Entry Archive template to use this tag instead:
<$MTCommentAuthorLink show_email="0" show_url="0"$>
(Another way to solve this problem is to replace the <$MTCommentAuthorLink$> tag with <$MTCommentAuthor$>.)
Now blog spammers can post to my site all they want (and they probably will continue to do so) but their links will be ineffective. Ha!
It looks like there are a couple of MT plugins (like Bayesian and CloseComments) which try to solve this problem as well.
Aren’t all these spammers using automated tools? Stopping their links from boosting their pagerank is good but they’re looking for volume not quality so the tools will just go ahead regardless. It’s the content of most of the spam I object to…