So, I finally missed a day. After about 2 months of steady blogging yesterday was the first non-weekend workday that I didn’t find the time to post. The problem? Not bandwidth, as the airport I was at following my morning project had a nice cybercafe. No, it was comment spam.
I knew I was in trouble as soon as I logged in, fired up Evolution and saw that I had over 200 messages for a 6 hr period. As Derek Zoolander said after getting 10,000 voicemails, “that’s a bit more than usual.” Essentially we got deluged with comment spams, which I’m still catching up on and deleting, and then there’s the IP banning, etc.
Blacklist failed to catch them primarily because the domains being spammed were not on my Blacklist, so they were all moderated. I really have to wonder what the drivers are here, since we’re very serious about removing and filtering every link, so the comment spams themselves are never on our site for more than a few hours. I know that spamming is a low effort endeavour, but seriously, what’s the return? Google can’t pick up those links within the few hours they’re there. My readers are certainly sharp enough to ignore them.
But ultimately it’s the low effort portion of the equation that matters, I guess. What a waste of virtual energy, though.
