As you may or may not have noticed, I've been having the occasional comment spam appear on my weblog, in the Chatter sidebar and on old entries. MT-Blacklist was identifying these as potential spam, though for this recent spate the spammer had registered a bunch of new domain names so they weren't outright blocked. MT-Blacklist puts suspected spam in "pending" status, so I can check if it's actually spam and let it through or delete it. For some reason, comments in pending status were being posted to my website, which meant I had to actively delete them and rebuild to get them off the site.

Turns out my problem was I was using an old version of Adam Kalsey's
SimpleComments plugin, which I use to combine TrackBacks and comments in a single display. The old version did not recognize the "pending" status and displayed all comments. I'm pleased to say the latest version does the right thing, and I no longer have to worry about spam appearing on the site.

Special thanks to Adam for quickly fixing a small bug I found where comments with a status of "pending" would cause old trackbacks to appear undesirably. The latest version also includes a few other features.