Dear Typepad, can I haz spam controls now plz?

What with all the angst at Pet Connection closing down, the last thing I want in my life is any more CHANGE, but I'm thisclose to moving this blog.

I can't freaking believe the amount of spam I get in my comments, sometimes 20 spam comments a day. I've had to put the blog on moderation, which I HATE both because it slows down the conversations or even stops them, and because in general I loathe a heavy hand.

I filed a support ticket over this a few weeks ago, and the person was very apologetic and said they were working on better spam controls, but this is the thing: I get email notifications of new comments on this blog. ONE HUNDRED PERCENT of the notifications for spam comments are being caught by Gmail's filters. ZERO percent of my actual comments are.

  I can tell at a glance that these things are spam; they all have similar syntax in the username. They all have the same phrases in them. Obviously Gmail has no problem identifying them as spam.

Typepad, seriously: What's the problem? If I had the energy, I'd already be gone. And in every other way, I love this service. I'd happily pay twice what I'm paying now to make this crap go away and be able to turn my moderation off.

Yours in extreme annoyance,

Christie

Comments

[pam picard]

Wordpress has a plugin called Akismet that catches spam. Is this or something like it available for Typepad?

[Christie Keith]

That's what we had on Pet Connection, and I would love it, but as far as I can tell from my earlier visit to the Akismet website, no. Typapad claims its "AntiSpam" plug in is even BETTER, but I very loudly beg to differ. Our spam control at PC was EXCELLENT, even with about a hundred times more comments.