“I woke the President to tell him we were under attack by the Russians!
Do you know how stupid that makes me look?!!”
— War Games
I moderate comments here: if you’ve never had a comment approved, all your comments go into a holding tank until I either approve or trash them, though once your first comment has been approved your subsequent comments are all automatically approved. It usually doesn’t matter much, since I don’t get many legitimate comments and have only one commenter, but that’s the way I like it because it blocks comment spam.
The other thing about comments is that I get an email every time one is posted. This is on my “extra” email account, which doesn’t get much use, especially after I unsubscribed from a mailing list I was on. Then this afternoon my phone dinged a few times, and when I looked I had 22 messages, all from this site and saying I had comments in moderation…
My site hadn’t gone viral, it was all just robo-spam: gibberish with a couple of websites thrown in, that kind of thing. I dealt with that set of comments by trashing them, and then a few hours later I got more, which I also dealt with. I noticed, though, that despite different names and email addresses, they were all coming from two internet addresses. I blacklisted those addresses, so now the comments go straight to trash, and I don’t get email notifications.
I just checked the comment trash here, and it had a ton of spam comments. I guess I’ll have to check and empty the trash every so often until this entity gets tired of sending them, but as far as I’m concerned it’s problem solved.
By the way, the offending internet addresses are assigned to a Russian ISP.
UPDATE: The spam continued for about 12 more hours then stopped.
