There are problems afoot on Open Salon.  Today wasn't the first time I've noticed it, but it was definitely the worst example so far.

I'm always interested in new comments to my posts, so when I woke up to email notifications of comments, I was initially thrilled.  However, it didn't take long for that thrill to turn sour.  Looking through the email trail, it quickly became clear that the comments were all spam

I spent a good 30 minutes deleting the close to 80 spam posts ... it turns out that a spammer had left a comment on EVERY single post on my blog, and I had to manually delete each and every one.  In the past, I've seen the odd spam comment show up on posts, and it's been pretty easy to get rid of them.  Today was a bit more of an operation, however.

I don't really know what the solution is, but I am hoping the gurus behind the scenes at OS are working on a fix of some sort.  Allowing blog owners to require a captcha phrase to post, or to approve all comments before they are posted might be a solution, or even some better tools to manage comments (simply the ability to select multiple comments for delete would be a significant improvement on the current situation) would be very useful.

I love OS, even though I've been less active for the past few months.  It's a wonderful place to express yourself, full of engaged and exciting people interested in joining the conversation.  Sadly, that sort of environment will always attract spammers, and OS has done a reasonably good job at keeping that to a minimum.  However, as my deletion of 78 comments this morning shows, bloggers here need more tools at their disposal to manage the spam comments that do manage to get through.

OS Gurus - can you help please?