Long-time visitors to the site may be wondering what's going on with comments at Nuketown; for the last year or so, anyone could post without having to log in or have their posts moderated. That's no longer the case.

The problem is spam; the site has been inundated with a particularly annoying variety of comment spam that uses random snippets of legitimate text taken from other web sites, news stories, etc. and a smattering of legitimate hyperlinks to provide cover for hardcore porn comments linking to sites that are anything but legitimate.

Akismet, my anti-spam tool, has had a hard time keeping up with this assault. Rather than have these comments make it to the web site, I've decided to change the way comments are handled at Nuketown.

For the foreseeable future, all comments from unauthenticated visitors will go into a moderation queue. I'll then approve or deny the comments based on their spamminess. Those with accounts on Nuketown can login and post comments without moderation.

It's not a perfect solution, but it's better than closing off comments to anonymous visitors entirely. I'm hoping I can switch back to unmoderated comments once Akismet figures out how to deal with these spam swarms.