That’s it; despite upgrading to the latest version of the anti-comment-spam software, and despite explicitly putting the word ‘poker’ in the blacklist, and despite having deleted and blacklisted hundreds of comments about online poker in the last 24 hours, I’m still getting comment spams about online poker.

I am shutting down comments until I have time to upgrade Tinotopia to some weblog software that has decent, functional anti-comment-spam hooha built in, rather than bolted on the side and non-functional as is the case with Movable Type.

Six Apart has had a good run, and they appear to be doing well with their TypePad service; but I must say that they appear to have largely given up on their Movable Type users. You can always spot weblogs that are powered by MT; the people who run them are always going on about comment and trackback spam the way Windows people go on about inexplicable driver failures.

Most serious Windows failures are the result of users who really don’t know what they’re doing; and I don’t doubt that at the heart of the failure of my installation of MT to detect and kill comment spams is some misconfiguration of my own.

Nevertheless, I don’t have time to screw with it — all the configuration options I can find look fine, and I have been using this software for years now, so it’s not like I’m a complete neophyte — and I don’t see why I should have to.