When I started this blog I made a rule that I wasn’t going to get involved in posting about the minutiae of running a weblog, because no one wants to read about that kind of bumpf. So I’ll just say this. I’m officially sick of spam. Depressingly, the Akismet ZeitGeist says more than 92% of comments are spam.

Comment spam is easily dismissed using the Akismet plugin for Wordpress. The Akismet developers really deserve a great deal of praise for their excellent work. After installing Akismet, I haven’t had to vet a single spam comment. Thanks guys.

But it still twists my melon that spammers are still consuming my site bandwidth. This one particular spammer really gets on my goat. I can tell this spammer from my site logs: they always use Windows NT4.0, use Firefox Pre-release, check one post, then the comment section, and then they submit a comment. Here’s their user agent:

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; WinNT4.0; en-US; rv:1.2b) Gecko/20021001 Phoenix/0.2

…which looks like the spammer may be using an old computer. I wonder why.
Now I’ve installed Lester Chan’s WP-Ban plugin, so all they’ll see from now on is a curt, “you’re banned” message.