One often asks one’s self, “Self, How many is too many?” Here’s the answer I got from myself.

– 1 motorcycle accident

– 3 startups, concurrently

– 115 comment spams in a single hour

The first one, a Tim vs. Tree incident I discussed briefly yesterday. The second is a side-effect of my personality, sad but true.

The last however, has a technology solution. A quick trip to Goggle lead me to the WordPress plug-in Spam Karma 2. The install process was completely painless; from download to running in about 10 minutes.

Once installed and running it examines all comments posted to the blog and assigns each a ‘karma value’. The points associated with certain characterstics of the message along with the actions to take based on the total karma are highly customizable. Even the admin interface is adjustable (basic vs. advanced); Brilliant!
I dug deep into my long (long, long, LONG) systems architecture and engineering experience bag and pulled out a basic tenant of systems design: “Go with the defaults!”. This is, of course, second only to the first tenant; “Let’s try rebooting”. Both are dwarfed of course, by the immortal words of Tech Support minions everwhere; “Ok, try it now.”.

According to the handy dashboard, in the first hour of operation SK2 squashed a grin-inducing 22 comment spams. Sweet.