Sometimes having not that many ‘real’ comments is nice: mysql> delete from mtcomment where commentcreated_on > ‘2004-05-22’; Query OK, 1133 rows affected (0.12 sec)

Even automated, setting the whole thing up must have taken the spammer much longer than 0.12 seconds :-)

What made the spam comments get through in the first place was that the URLs were using not ASCII letters, but Unicode numeric values (like http://casinos-jp.com), so the MT-Blacklist regexp covering ‘casino’ didn’t catch it. I have now added an appropriate catch-all regexp for any URI containing & — hopefully that will stop it next time. (And yes, I know this will catch some legitimate URIs as well, but so what.)