Blogger Has A Comment Spam Problem

I noticed a dramatic increase in the amount of comment spam.

I turned on the "CAPTCHA required for Anonymous commenters" feature. Unfortunately, a lot of the comment spam is from people with Blogger IDs. It only takes a few seconds to create an ID, and that isn't much of a deterrent.

I manually moderate all comments. It'd be nice if there were an "auto-approve" feature for people who left a comment before. WordPress has much better "catch comment spam" features. I'd still want the final call on moderate/reject; some automated spam filters have false positives.

Another annoying bit is that Blogger has no ability to write your own features. In the few years I've been using it, there have been practically no new features. For example, the "Best of FSK" list must be generated by me by hand. There's no integration with Google Analytics. With WordPress, there's extensions available or I could write one myself.

Another risk of Blogger is that someone could hack my Blogger/gmail account and I'd lose my blog. Another problem is that Google could say "TOS violation!" and I'm SOL.

I really need to switch to self-hosted WordPress. I'm getting pretty annoyed with Blogger. I've been planning to wait until my AdBrite earnings go over $20/month, but I'm thinking of going ahead and doing it anyway.

I set up a PHP/Apache server at work, so now I'm feeling more comfortable doing that myself on a Linode.

Right now, I have a plain cell phone. I'm probably going to get a PDA/phone so I can write stuff on the subway and then download it to my PC when I get home.