Alright, closing in here. Christ, my whole frickin’ day has been wasted. The problem with flood-control denied comments stemmed from one of the layers of sparmor. It requires the comment to be funnelled through a preview before it will be accepted.

Argh. I looked at one of the plugins, and found it was easy to install on my main blogsite, but relies on an update to the stored comments templates that I have not applied to any of the additional blogs. So now I need to review the comment templates on the old blogs for design idiosyncrasies. What a pain!

UPDATE: Nice! It’s now 2:30. I think everything is in place. Christ, I sure don’t want to have to screw around with mod_security stuff at the apache level.

Would-be commenters, please email me if you get a big fat denied or 404. Meanwhile, I need to see a man about a horse.

I receieved a succinct email from the proprietor of daymented.com, to wit: “why??”

She’d attempted to comment on one or another of my recent posts but alas, I, acting in my primary occupational capacity of distracted halfwit, had closed the comments along with the trackbacks the other day.

Comments are once again open but moderated. Talk amongst yourselves. My sincere apologies.

UPDATE: um, never mind. For now. The second I opened comments, the spambot pinned my CPU again. That was about an hour ago, and it took that long to wait for the lag in processing the few clicks needed to pull mt-comments.cgi out of the directory.

Unfortunately, I have Things To Do to day and so I shan’t be implementing yet another layer of comment-spam security just this second. Comments are brute-force disabled for now, so sorry for the inconvenience.

Damn I wish MT had just built the stupid local white-listing feature instead of the dumbass centralized key-ID system. It looks as though it builds value, but in the long-term, central user-IDs actually build liability.