OK, so the presses haven't ground to a halt just yet. I was looking over my blog, searching for recent comments. There haven't been many -- perhaps it's time to retire this blog.
But on 10-11 December, there were about 7 comments logged on ancient posts, and each of the comments was spam. There was some trite one-liner in the text of the comment, but the URL given was the typical spam URL you get in email these days.
I deleted them dutifully, but I probably won't bother in the future; is anybody else plagued by these things or am I just (un)lucky?
I've gotten them before. They always seem to show up only on really old posts, so I ususally just leave them there.
Posted by: david at December 19, 2003 8:27 AM
Actually, right after I left the last comment, I found one of those spam comments on a front-page post. I deleted it. I don't care too much if its buried in the archives; no one is going to see it there. But when its on the front page the liklihood of someone reading it being offeneded by it is higher, so I deleted it.
Posted by: david at December 19, 2003 8:54 AM
Yeah, I get them occasionally. And I take the same approach to it as David.
On a side note, I hope that you don't really retire your blog. That would be quite sad.
Posted by: Nathan at December 19, 2003 10:50 AM
Agreed, don't retire the blog...
I've also gotten the spam, and as everyone else, it's been mostly confined to my archives... but a few have appeared on recent posts.
Posted by: Ed at December 19, 2003 11:23 AM
I also don't think you should retire your blog. Even if I don't leave coments every day, I certainly read this site every day and would miss it if it were gone.
Posted by: david at December 19, 2003 5:51 PM
OK, I get it -- I won't retire it yet. I am so sick of spam I can't see straight. Do you think somebody has an automatic spam poster for blogs? It's not inconceivable but hard to believe it would be that useful.
Posted by: rkc at December 20, 2003 5:41 AM
Please don't retire the blog. Just because I don't comment, doesn't mean I'm not reading and relishing everything you post! And I would guess that is the case with many other readers. Like I said in my email a few months ago, reading your entries makes me nostalgic for our carefree high school days of hilarious and philosophical banter.
Posted by: Dana at December 22, 2003 1:29 PM
Ron-
Comment spam seems to be quite the problem these days. And given that movable type is so popular you'd think someone would have written a script to post these. But, from what I've read it seems that the current trend is to use tools to find the sites, and then leave the spam by hand.
Here's an article by the makers of movable type discussing some possible comment spam solutions:
http://www.sixapart.com/log/2003/10/comment_spam.shtml
They announced this weekend that the next version of movable type will support option one (registered comments), but that doesn't seem like a perfect solution because anonymous comments are sometimes nice.
In the meantime, I think I'll install mt-blacklist (http://www.jayallen.org/projects/mt-blacklist/), a mt plugin that helps battle comment spam, on all the -273 sites.
Posted by: david at December 22, 2003 2:49 PM