A significant change...

[seawasp]

... I have been forced to now require comments to be made by registered users, disabling anonymous comments, because, alas, I've been getting anonymous comments from automated spammers.

Comments

[argonel.livejournal.com]

Personally I think they should be declared a nuciance species that can be shot at anytime and with a bounty on their hands. (No need to kill them, just prevent them from spamming and I'm happy.

[laptop-mechanic.livejournal.com]

That works too.

[kengr]

My own "modest proposal" is simple:

Allow users to report spam to their ISP and they get $5 if it is spam. The ISP is allowed to go after whoever passed the spam to them for the $5 *plus reasonable costs of figuring out who it was*.

So this rolls on up the line until you either hit the spammer's ISP (who get to collect from said spammer) or some fool with an open relay or a hijacked machine.

For open relays, too bad. For hijacked systems, they may get a pass *if* their AV software and the like were up to date. If their software was up to date, then they get to go after MS or Apple or whoever.

The big snag is the spam coming from overseas. But that could be handled be requiring companies connecting to the US to agree to pay the spamming fees as a condition of connecting.

All of this would give businesses a rather major incentive to hunt spammers and to fix software.