It's ironic... Chris and I were just talking about this last week. Older versions of Movable Type are highly susceptible to automated comment insertion, where unscrupulous internet shamboys run scripts that post commercial comments wherever possible. Chris was hit hard with it some months back, so he removed the comment feature on his weblog. I was slammed once, end of last month. I manually deleted all the offending comments and crossed my fingers.
And then yesterday I was hit again, as a hundred "comments" all advertising some Online Poker game appeared all over my site. So I dumped my comment feature too.
Which sucks. It's nice that some brainless scumbags get to ruin my personal, non-commercial, barely-visited (comparatively) website. And to further confound matters, the poker stuff advertised doesn't even seem to exist. If you go to one of hundreds of fakey URLs embedded in the comment, you just get a big ugly text page talking about how great and wonderful this mythical online poker is... without a single link to any genuine method to play poker online. were I to guess - and I am - it looks like a site designed to transmit spyware and other malicious code onto unsuspecting users. Since I'm on a Mac and therefore untouchable by such things, I clicked with abandon. But I would hate to be unknowingly sending Windows folks over to those sorts of scams.
So down came all the "live user comments" stuff from the site's video game reviews. I still have all the comments archived behind the scenes. Should I one day upgrade to Movable Type's pay version, I'll bring them back, since the pay MT has much more robust control over comments. Until then, this site is read-only.
I did like the meager interactivity the comment fields provided, especially for dissenting opinions and questions on video games. Although (aside from my various Pokemon diaries) the only game is really pull in a large list of comments was Boris's negative Jet Set Radio Future review. Somehow, that review must have ended up reaching some rabid JSRF fans, because they came in from all over with insults and indignant language on ol' Boris. It amused me. I've had email requests to open up a complete forum for users... so that's something I've been investigating. I'm not sure I have the time to moderate it, however, and forums in general are something I personally avoid. Nothing would look sillier than a gigantic fourhman.com forum sub-site with 10 registered users and 2 abandoned topics. That's why I liked the low key MT comments thing: minimal expectations, yet the ever-present ability for people to post a message.
Since I was carpet bombing all the commenty features, I took the chance to slightly alter my video games page. Now the full reviews are listed by console for easier browsing. And as for the Quick Reviews... I've never been happy with how the Quick Reviews pages look - and I'm still not - but I like the concept, so I'm leaving them around. My site would be cleaner without them, but sometimes I just want to dash off a short paragraph about a game instead of a full-blown review. Some of my big reviews take me hours to put together, for better or for worse... so the Quick Reviews are a nice exercise in being succinct.
The sad thing is that had I been asked to link out to a real, classy online poker site, I probably would have. But as I said, the jackholes who spammed my site have no such thing and are only looking to implant garbage code inside your Windows box. At least it wasn't a string of porn URLs, I suppose.
