I’m not sure how I ended up missing it, but — Movable Type v2.661 interim release is out and includes some new protection against comment abuse.

[Updated: 10:00pm] After upgrading, it looks like the protection enhancements are quite minor. There’s a new ‘comment throttle threshold‘ setting and an automatic redirector for comment URLs (to limit Google PageRank twisting). Otherwise, nothing else to mention.

If you’re having a comment spam problem, check out scode from James Seng. It adds a new field to comment forms that requires the mandatory entry of a randomly generated code similar to the Network Solutions whois setup. Looks promising.