One reason you haven't heard so much from me? When I get home these days after a very long day working, I've generally found over 100 trackback spams in my inbox, generally from the same source. Although it should be easy to get rid of them, MT-Blacklist is causing some trouble. First of all, there's a 3,878 limit on your blacklist entries (i.e. you can block that many sites), and guess what, I hit it last week. Checking my email each day now takes fifteen minutes, as one hundred notifications have to come off the site. And--ugh--there's some database problems with my MT-Blacklist installation (my host has been monkeying with its MySQL settings again), which means removing them isn't as easy as it should be. Oh, yeah, did I mention that all of this spam activity is pushing me towards a bandwidth cap?

A friend of mine once joked that the only reason she didn't support a general ban on the death penalty was that then we'd never be able to apply it to spammers. While that's not the only reason I support the death penalty, any abolitionist had better come up with a pretty damn good counterargument. [1]

So next weekend, it looks like I'll be biting the bullet and upgrading to MT 3.x. This is probably a more difficult task than I'd expect, but we'll hope I can accomplish it with relatively few tears. Yes, it will cost me some money, but it will also give me access to the SpamLookup plugin. Hell, if Jay Allen (the guy behind MT Blacklist) raves about it, it's got to be good.

[1]: OK, so the death penalty for spamming is a bit over the top (but not exactly unheard of humour). Still, if one wanted to get into a Posneresque Law and Econ discussion about it, you could probably justify the death penalty for spammers. Figure that a given trackback spammer is costing me fifteen to twenty minutes a day cleaning up his rubbish. Then figure that he's probably doing that to thousands of people per day. Presuming we shorten his life by the amount of wasted time he's cost others, we probably need to hope that the culprit belongs to a religion that believes in reincarnation if we ever hope to get any form of justice.