Programmer Musings

An Apology

For most of the ten months I've written this weblog, I've tried to keep it open for comments. Now, I finally have to bow to the inevitable.

Although I have enjoyed getting comments from a few people. (Possibly the only ones who have read this<grin/>), I have gotten far more spam than actual comments. To give you an idea, I have received 1574 individual comments on my weblog. Of those, 8 were actual comments. The rest were peddling drugs or gambling or whatever.

I was doing okay killing a handful to a dozen a day. Any IP address that seemed to consistently send spam was banned from commenting. (As of today, 49 addresses were banned from commenting on this site.)

But today, the spammers went too far. I received 929 spam comments around noon today. The cleanup time was far longer than I wanted to spend on cleaning up someone else's mess. More annoying is the fact that someone was trying to use my website to sell drugs. It's kind of like walking outside to find that your house, garage, fence , and car have all been plastered with signs selling products from some drugstore.

So as of now, I am turning off the commenting feature. If I can come up with a way to stop (or at least limit) this kind of thing, I may turn it back on. If you want to send a comment, feel free to email me at comment@anomaly.org. If it's a real comment, I'll try to post it as such. If it's just spam, expect it to be deleted.

To the few of you that are reading this and might have liked to comment, I apologize.