A week or so ago, I spent several hours painstakingly removing hundreds of comment spams from this blog. Every one of them featured links to poker sites on the Web. Consequently, I had to modify my blog settings to require member registration to post comments—which has resulted in a drop in comments. I’m in the process of configuring a new blog app from the same company that includes Captcha, a utility that requires anybody submitting a comment to enter a word they see in a graphic in order to post their thoughts. It’s easier than registering as a member and will thwart most comment spam, which is blasted onto blogs by machines and not posted individually by humans.

I’m not the only one suffering as a result of comment spammers. Earlier this week, Six Apart—the company behind Moveable Type—released a patch to address a flaw that allowed comment spam to slow down servers even if the comments were blocked. And today, according to an eWeek article, Microsoft bloggers working on the Microsoft Developers Network are being told to turn on comment moderation while the company investigates a significant spike in the amount of comment spam.

Efforts to thwart e-mail spammers have failed as spam continues to account for most of the e-mail flying through servers these days. Whatever solutions are devised for blog comment spam, the spammers are just as likely to find ways to overcome them. It’s worth repeating that Dave Winer, godfather of blogging, doesn’t find comments a particularly integral part of blogging. If someone wants to comment, they can do it through their own blogs, he suggests. If something can’t be done about comment spammers, that may ultimately be the only route we can take to maintain a dialogue in the absence of a comment feature.