Whisper it softly, but I’ve turned comments back on. Actually, they were only off for about twelve hours. But it seems to have done the trick. Since I turned them back on I’ve had one piece of comment spam (as opposed to hundreds every hour). If you get overwhelmed by comment spam then simply removing the comment facility for a few hours seems to be a pretty good solution. A few hours of not responding to the comment spammers requests seems to get you removed from their lists.
Of course I’m not saying for a second that this will be permanent. I fully expect to see things creeping back up again soon. But it’s a nice break.
And I like having comments turned on. My site returns surprisingly high Google results for a number of strange things (try googling for naughty teenagers) and people turn up at random and add interesting comments. A good example of this was my piece about the Anna in Wonderland programme on vampires. That programme was shown on RTE yesterday and three new comments appeared soon after it finished.
So anyway, my fingers are crossed. Let’s see how it goes.