I've wanted to return to open comments here and I haven't found an easy way to do it. The problem is all the old comment spam. I have over 82,000 comments on open posts in the archives, most of it spam. My provider changed the permissions on my comment program because, they claimed, it was overwhelming the system. After a while I changed them back, but within a minute, dozens of new spam comments appeared.

I know there are ways to screen for junk, but that keeps the spam comment from being posted, not from being processed, stored and eventually deleted by the blogging software, all of which strain system resources.

Hoping that newer versions of Movable Type might help, I went from ver 3.2 to 4 Beta. That was a disaster (and stressful to boot!) So back to 3.2 and then to 3.5 which, if you can see this, is working.

But there's nothing helpful in the upgrades or the documentation. I haven't given up, though. I'm deleting old comments 500 at a time which takes some time. With 82,800 to go I estimate I'll have it done by Christmas.

Apart from switching to Wordpress, any suggestions?

UPDATE: I give up. Since I turned comments on the spam has been coming faster than I could delete it. Back to no comments.