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Blogging: I must turn off comment support for now, due to blog-spammers
Sun, 08 Jan 2006

If you look at not-quite-recent posts in my blog (especially the older ones) you will notice that most of the commentary is from spammers; they just have automated 'bots' that fill up blogs with inane fake replies that link to their penis-enlargement sites - the bonus to them being a higher "reference count" in search engines like Google, that track that sort of thing. I cannot tolerate spam of course, and there is just no way I will support their habits by letting them post comments in my blog.

If you wish to comment on a posting, please head over to the LiveJournal version of my blog (link on the right) and comment there. Blame the spammers!

This sort of problem is so bad in the blogging communities that the large blog services (such as LiveJournal) have added various anti-spammer-bot mechanisms usually requiring comment-posters to answer a challenge-question of some sort (such as reading a fuzzy picture for text). I use a simple blog system (blosxom) that features plugins to enhance functionality, and the comment plugin doesn't have this level of protection. Obviously I can work on it myself, but time is tight.. hopefully the plugin authors will fix it up so I can just inheret a fix. (Or I may implement something simple, requiring commenters to enter the name of the day of the week in English, so that it varies a little.. but the spammers would eventually figure that out, perhaps.)

So for now, I'm going to turn off the commenting system. Yet another reason to hit a spammer in the face (and lower) if you find one in the flesh.

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