Parasitic Scum

I’ve just got back from a welcome little break to Southern Spain (there’s a few snaps on Flickr). Sadly before I left I forgot to disable commenting on all posts. As a result please accept my apologies if you were exposed to any of the comments left by evil money-grabbing parasitic spammers.

It’s becoming a real pain dealing with this scum. Almost everyday for the last few months I’ve had to manually ssh into my site and delete spam comments from the database (I haven’t got round to adding something into the CMS to do this yet).

I’m not sure what the best way is to handle this. I see comments as an essential element of weblogs, so, unless things get really bad, I want to continue to allow them. I guess I could use the TypeKey authentication, but I only really see this as a last resort. I notice that some weblogs have little ‘I’m not Spam’ checkboxes, but I’m not sure how effective this is.

Depsite my problems at least I’ve not had it as bad as Tom Coates.

Posted 3 years, 9 months ago

The "I’m not spam" option found on such (un)notable sites as mine plus (more notable) Matt Pennels (thewatchmakerproject.com) and Jon Hicks (hicksdesign.co.uk) is part of a textpattern plugin nhn_livecommentpreview (though I’m not sure that’s what they use). Combined with a spl.spamhaus.org blacklist that seems to keep the spammers from my little corner, at least for the moment. But then it is a little corner.

Gareth Rushgrove · www · 3 years, 9 months ago

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My name is Phil Lindsay, a web guy from Scotland, now living in Newcastle upon Tyne in England. I also run a web design company called Presence. You can email me at phil@xlab.co.uk, read more ramblings on my Twitter stream and view my photos on Flickr. You can grab the RSS feed for this weblog here.