After dealing with a bunch of comment spam tonight, I decided to take a different approach to dealing with it. While others point out some features that will come up with the next version of MT, I had another idea MT can use, as well as one all bloggers can use. For the MT developers, I'd suggest instead of just offering a user sign-up for commenters, or moderated comments, they can offer moderated urls. Since some comment spammers are looking for "google juice" as Joi Ito calls it, just moderating the urls allows you to choose whether to accept the link or not, while allowing free commenting.
Another idea which is my new policy here, is to subvert their goals of using link text to get a high ranking on google, for any money keyword. If all the blogger victims of spam were to simply erase the urls of comment spammers, then the spammers themselves would subvert their very own targetted keywords. Instead of pointing to their url, they would wind up creating a ton of competition for their money words! If this got to be popular, targetting keywords in blog comment spam would die overnight.
Update: Instead of just deleting the url, I am now borrowing a page from Google and linking to charity organizations.
