I don't know which is the greater struggle: keeping spammers, scammers, and hackers off my site, or convincing all the block lists and filters that my site isn't a spammer, scammer, or hacker. (Used to be the former, but the latter is becoming all too common.)
@gpfjeff By "site", you mean the comment system?
Have you looked at pubkey based comment systems? Spam drives account based interaction toward centralization - via the mechanism you are experiencing.
Here is a comment system based on the Nostr protocol (low barrier to entry for newbies):
https://github.com/carlitoplatanito/disgus
@customdesigned ... because my ISP, try as they might, can't seem to stay off various block lists. One bad actor gets in and starts spewing spam or scanning for exploits, and before they can be shut down, several overly-reactionary block lists ban their entire ASN, including hundreds of legitimate users like me. I understand the need for blocking bad actors (I do myself), but carpet-banning entire networks for one bad apple is ridiculous. I have paying customers I can't send mail to.
@gpfjeff You need a friend to relay mail. I do that for customers that get on ban lists for similar reasons. (And silly reasons, like forwarding all their mail to gmail for "spam checking", flagging spam on gmail and wondering why gmail then bans their MX...)
I'm sure you already have friends that run an MX. But if not, you can relay through mine. I haven't met you personally, but read your comic.
@gpfjeff The Nostr system uses a single browser extension to hold your key pair (plus additional pairs for multiple identities) for all platforms. So once you install the extension, there is no effort. But yeah, "normies" find it mind blowing.
@customdesigned Sorry for the late reply. While that link looks interesting, I really think very few of my readers are going to go through the trouble of generating key pairs for authentication to a comment system on any site, let alone mine. (Sure, I have a geekier audience, but that's a lot of hoops to jump through to say, "You misspelled a word in the second panel".) My current spam-blocking strategy works well enough. I'm mostly venting...