Woke up to over 1550 comment spam on my blog this morning. I can't sit and delete them all by hand, so am hereby begging the people at Blogware to do it for me with a database query. In the meantime, anon comments is turned off, HTML in comments is turned off, and I'm sorry for the pollution.
I really do hope that we find a way to inflict gangrene or maybe necrotising faciitis on spammers the world over. Actually a nice bout of acute necrotising faciitis with MRSA and maybe some slow-acting form of a haemorrhagic virus just for fun. Or maybe you can just pin them down whilst I drive in the bamboo.
UPDATE: And yes, I've turned off anon comments. And yes, I've turned on NoFollow, even though both those actions go against the grain.
Drowning in spam
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I've got some nice rusty nails in the shed.
I've had to turn off incoming Trackback pings on my blog, the filters on comments force just about anything with English words into moderation (Welsh is still safe, but it's only a matter of time before someone sets up a Tregaron Hold-Em site), and my referrer logs are worthless.
Yep, same here. I think Blogware is going to wake up to a really, really pissed off customer and reseller base. Yikes.
Which is a shame, because I firmly believe that Blogware is the best hosted blogging solution out there.
I've noticed that you've been getting a lot of comment spam, because I set one or two of my replies so I got notifications, and every time they spam you I get it by proxy. Don't Blogware have a Turing test you can use?
In the meantime, a Plague of Emerods on them all : necrotising haemahrroids, so the bastards have to program standing up.
My blog used to receive comment spam from some bottom-feeding scumbag somewhere. At first I tried blocking by IP, only to find that said vermin seemed to be using a botnet, and coming from hundreds of IPs. Currently, I've got a points-based system, where URLs, HTML and certain keywords add points and anything over a threshold gets a 60-second wait followed by a cryptic “Database error” message. (I followed advice on Everything in Moderation, in the hope that a broken-looking website would encourage the scumbags to go away and play somewhere else (ideally in traffic) rather than egging them on to beat my ph33rsome anti-spam defenses; it didn't seem to work, as it seems to be a bot)
I'm now hacking on a captcha-like system for testing if people are human (does anybody know of a good command-line program for distorting PPMs, btw? I'd want something lighter than a serverised Gimp), and will probably add an authentication system later. Given that my blog is standalone and it would be unreasonable to ask people to remember another username/password just for it, I'll probably make it accept federated OpenID identities.
Anyway, it looks like the Blogware spammers are more creative than my lot, or at least hacked an automatic thesaurus into their script, coming up with surreal prospects like “Absolve Pantyhose Galleries”, “Flump Pumpkin Costume” and “Omega 3 Fatso Acids”
If anyone ever invented a device to punch spammers in the face via the Internet, I'd be more than happy to buy a few! 😀 I had a slight spate of comment spam on my own blog which was more or less resolved with a captcha (naughty me). However, that turned to referrer spam (pointless, as my web stats are not public) which I managed to kill off with a bit of mod_security (black-)magic.
I don't get comment spam, mainly because every comment has to be personally approved. It's clunky and slow, but it stops them.
Mind you, the text that you get when you put a comment on my blog could have something to do with it….
May I most generously offer my services to help you deleting spam comments ?
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