If you don’t have MT, or if you have MT but do’t have comments emailed to you or some other notfication device, you may have missed three rather insideous effords. one is a comment spammer, who writes what apprear to be moderately pleasent comments that have links from the author but the author’s name links to a porn site. Less sneaky is an indivdual who simple sticks the same annoying email spam on viagra etc in your comments feild. Most subtle of all are a number of folk who are commenting in a way that suggests a lack of interest in the topics but an interest in getting a google page rank up. Jay Allen has an excellent hack to handle the first two: Killing Comment Spam for Dummies (i’ve linked to the ADD write up, for people like me).
The third is with us as long as Google relies heavily on blogs for ranking, and people want to beat the system.
I’d like to request MT build spam blocking techniques into the tools (such as incorproating Jay’s hack and maybe also allowing you to turn off author links, or auto-populate them. )
And maybe Google should learn to not harvest comment URL’s.