One more update

Hal at Harvard Weblogs kindly set my default setting for comments and pings to “off.” Daryl (see PS to previous entry) was correct when he advised me that the spam flood was coming through trackbacks (pings), hence turning trackback off for the whole blog solved the problem.

You’ll note that this entry and the previous two have open comments (and trackbacks, too). I’m keeping the default at “off,” but from now on, I’ll do regular maintenance on this blog. For eg., every Friday (well, ok, sometimes Saturday), I do “housekeeping” on my computer(s): I run AdAware, C-Cleaner, AVG, and Spybot. That’s for Windows. For Mac there’s Macjanitor and CacheX. From now on, I’ll expand my vigilance to the blog, closing comments and pings every second Friday on the entries I’ve written that month, and so forth. That will mean that at any given time, there won’t be more than two weeks’ worth of entries with open comments or trackbacks (and given my sporadic writing here, that could mean very few entries indeed), which should keep the spammers at bay.
Phew!