intertwingly

One of the major topics to du Jour is spam comments.  There are those who are wildly optimistic and others who are wildly pessimistic...  (I tend to the optimistic side myself - the trick is to keep the cost/benefit ratio in your favor)

This turns out to be rather timely, given that I was just hit by 143 spams from a single individual over a thirteen hour period.  By all indications this was not automated.

The removal, however, was.  All it took to wipe all these comments out was a single command (which I had to issue twice, once before I flew out to ApacheCon, and one after I landed to clear out the ones created while I was in flight).  This is not much trouble for me, but it does tend to get noticed by people who are subscribed to my comments feed.

So... I've implemented a throttle.  The code is straightforward, but the policy is difficult to put into words.  Suffice it to say that no one can put in three consecutive comments within the period of a day or put in three comments total within a five minute period.