Attack of the Blog Spammers
I’m afraid we have been forced to change our comments policy at Terra Extraneus. Henceforth, the first comment that a reader makes on this blog will require moderation and approval. Subsequent comments by the same person will post immediately, without moderation.
This has become necessary because the spammers have turned vicious. It is only 9 in the morning, and I have already been forced to delete about 25 spam messages posted on Terra Extraneus this morning in the form of comments. It is obvious from the way these comments read that they are generated automatically by some evil spam program. Some of them contain obscene language, and most of them have links to objectionable websites. That’s the idea, I guess, to make us curious about who put up the comment, so we will click back to their site.
Rod Heggy and I welcome all legitimate comments, from both friends and strangers, from both people who agree and who disagree with what we have to say. But we are forced to go to first-comment moderation to fight back against the spammers.
If you attempt to post a legitimate comment and run into any problems, I apologize in advance for your inconvenience. Please send me an email and I will correct the problem.
Dear God, what have I done?
Actually, what I’ve done is jump over a few intervening releases (like almost three years’ worth) and installed MovableType 3.2. There may be some anomalies during the first few days…
So will this policy encourage comments such as this, which has no other purpose than to get me pre-approved just in case I want to make an actual meaningful comment in the future?
Charles (Dustbury)…I’m pretty pleased with WordPress. It will be the topic of my next post. One reason is the abundance of free plug-ins made available by the WordPress population. I’ve installed a great anti-spam comment plug-in that seems to be 100% effective in eliminating the problem.
Don…Evidently so. Now we all have something to look forward to: your forthcoming unhindered meaningful comment.
I’ve got a WordPress blog running on another domain, mostly for educational purposes: mine, so I can figure out PHP.
MT has rather a lot of plugins itself, though the trick is knowing which ones work with which versions, since MT 3.x is much different from the 2.x versions I used up through, well, last night.