I’ve had Typekey authentication running here since April, which has had a dramatic (positive) effect on comment spam. It’s also been a solid performer.
Until now. At the moment, I seem unable to reach Typekey, which means I can’t comment on my blog. I’m not sure how universal this problem is — I know of a few other netizens that are having some odd routing problems at the moment — but it highlights one danger of relying on an external service, i.e., it’s one more point of failure. As it is now. My blogs are up and accessible, but comments are not. For me, at least.
I’d noticed OpenID as an alternative a few weeks back. I need to look at it more carefully (once I get MT 3.2 up and running), though on first blush I’m not sure it does what I want (and seems restricted to folks who actually have a blog/journal site, which would be lame).
Seems to be working again.