Thursday, December 23, 2004

I am so sick and tired of the comment spam. I’ve been getting nailed since last night. I’ve changed the name of the register.php file to something they couldn’t figure out. I’ve closed posts. I’ve closed commenting on posts. I’ve increased the timelock on commenting to 10 minutes. I refuse to close commenting all together - it’s the main reason I keep blogging - the interaction with my readers and friends. If I can’t get this to stop, I may just shut down the blog. Because this is not fun and I’m not enjoying this aspect of blogging at all. I spend more time deleting comments than I do reading blogs and writing to my own.

I know some of you know how to write scripts to your MySQL whatevers to make it stop, will one of you email me with explicit instructions on how to do that? Is that still working for you?

Will the rest of you hunt down these fiends and kill them, please?

UPDATE: I’ve temporarily renamed the comments page. Maybe that will halt this recent attack. I deleted 50+ comments before I got fed up. *sigh*

LATER: Changing the filename of the comments page had no effect - so that’s back to normal. The timelock helps more, so that will be increased to 15 minutes. I’m sorry for the inconvenience for my regular commenters. At this point I’m almost ready to give up the fight. The new EE blog will start from scratch on a new domain and I do not plan to import the posts from this blog to it. I’m going to let this one fester and die on the vine, sadly. I wonder how long it’ll take before all posts are completely overrun with comment spam?

LATERER: Hmmm, timelock does not really work after all. So that’s been reduced to 3 minutes to ward off ordinary spammers - you know, those phentermine folks. The p-o-k-e-r folks are botting me to death, although I almost appreciate the whimiscal philosophical quotes they leave along with their links.