Killer Spam
We experienced an unpleasant phenomenon over our summer hiatus. About a week ago, a reader sent an email pointing out that there were some links to innappropriate websites in the comments to one of our spring weblog postings. Upon closer examination, we found that virtually all of our weblogs the past 18 months were clogged with “spam comments” - not real comments from a reader, but computer-generated ones that do nothing but link to external websites. And not just a few, either. There were 3,172 of them. And each individual comment contained twenty to forty separate links to websites, all of them of a nature far beyond the boundaries of good taste.
Several hours of work later, our weblog is again rated “G” (thank you, Kevin!), and will be available for adding comments again sometime soon. Needless to say, there will be a filtering system to prevent such attacks in the future.
Not that it matters much, anyway. There have only been a half-dozen non-spam comments in the last year!