Coinciding with the hoo-haa surrounding the announcement of Six Apart’s Typekey - a centralised weblog comment system aimed at reducing comment spam for MT and Typepad users - I had my own comment spam attack last night. It occured in this post about meta-tags from July 2002, and, in amongst the flood of messages, the spammer suggested that I was a nerd. A deep insult I think you’ll agree; geek maybe, but not a nerd.

Anyway, as I doubt I’ll be using Typekey in the future, I’m sticking to a more ‘nuts & bolts’ method of deterring spammers. Through a bit of detective work using Refer and my Apache access logs, I found the spammer’s IP address and country (Australia). Then with a bit of .htaccess jiggerypokery I blocked the spammer and sent them to this 403 page. Um… maybe I am a nerd :-/