New version of MT is out, 2.661. It includes some anti-comment-spam measures, including:

• Submission rate throttling by IP. If you try to submit too many comments too fast (settable parameter, in seconds), the submission will be blocked and your IP will go on the ban list. It's a small enough number that manual submissions are unlikely to trigger it, but it should help block scripted spamming.

• Links in the Comment Author's URL field are now redirected in a fashion that will keep them from contributing to Google PageRanks. That, of course, is 95% of the purpose behind comment spam, and thus (if everyone did it) would make it close to obsolete. Note that this will only affect rebuilt posts/comment URLs.

Good stuff, and (so far) no problems from the installation.

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I have tried the redirect on one of my comments. Way cool. I wonder whether the next big thing will be trackback pings, though. Testing internal links.

Links internal to the comment are not affected (probably a good thing, and they're pretty obvious, too), only the Author URL link in comments.

There are relatively-benign conflicts between this MT update and the current MT-Blacklist. Essentially the latter bypasses the former's comment code, so the throttling-by-IP (first bullet above) doesn't kick in. No actual harm, just a potential benefit lost. Jay at MT-Blacklist is working on it.