The comment-spammers have claimed another victim: John has taken down all commenting at his blog. This sucks. I’m not immune either; w-g now regularly gets batches of hundreds of spam comments a couple times a week. (This is even more remarkable considering that I’m using homemade blogging software, which means some effing spammer actually went to the trouble of programming a special case for my site.) I’m doing what I can to fight back. Archived posts are still open to commenting but anything older than two weeks must now be approved before being visible on the site. I’ve just added some code that checks to make sure that my site is the proper referrer for any form submissions. And I’ve also written up some tools to make blasting the damn things on the backend easier. Please let me know if any of this creates issues for you (real people) commenting. I’m just trying desperately not to have to resort to some sort of registration system.
Oh, and I got rid of the BackLinks (my version of TrackBack) too. I was getting hundreds of spams via that route too but I decided that the net benefit just wasn’t worth it. Nobody pays attention to TrackBacks anyway nowadays, do they?
One response
I’m astonished that the spammers are actually going to the trouble of targeting homebrew comments systems: that’s downright scary.
I suppose you could always take it as a sign of how desirable your readership is to the spammers that they went to such trouble. Or then again, perhaps not: if you’re getting the same sort of comment spam I did then it would seem that the comment spammers think that your audience is in urgent need of cheap cigarettes, child porn and viagra.