Comments on this site are now moderated. After a week of daily spam runs that have managed to get past other blocking methods, I’m tired of messing with it. At least with moderation, they won’t show up on the site.

This means that when you post a comment, it will not show up immediately. One of us will have to get the moderation notice and approve the message before it will appear.

I apologize to those who want to make actual comments on our posts. Just one more thing for which you can thank the spammers.

Update: It turns out it could have been much worse. The run of about 15 comment spams that showed up this morning turns out to be the few that made it through out of a total of 357. Over the course of 20 minutes this morning, a network of 126 zombies posted nearly 360 junk comments to this site, and 95% of them were rejected immediately. On one hand, it gives me a bit more faith in the countermeasures, but on the other hand, the scale of the attack is just staggering.

5 thoughts on “Thank you, spammers

  1. Because this post will eventually drop off the front page, here are some handy search trippers for future reference:

    Why can’t I see my comment?
    What happened to my comment?
    Where’s my comment?
    Comment not posted
    Comment rejected
    Comments broken
    Ate my comment
    Site broken

    (Kelson, feel free to delete this if it won’t be of any use.)

  2. Spammers are goddamn annoying I have to admin, referral spammers too.

    You should get one of those plugins that requires you to type the first word of the post or random letters from a turing image, those are 100% effective.

  3. I’ve thought about it, which shows just how annoying the spam is because I hate those things. It always feels like I’m being asked to show my papers or something, and then of course there are the obstacles to accessibility. I forget where I read it, but someone remarked recently that there is no way to make a Turing test of that sort which will lock out bots without also locking out (or at least making it difficult for) people with disabilities.

    That said, I know some sites have alternate methods, like audio captchas, to handle the accessibility issues, and Spam Karma will use an image test only if its first round of filtering comes out ambiguous.

    It’s just very frustrating trying to keep the crapfloods out while keeping the gateway open for casual comments.

  4. Three rules for the spam game:

    1) you can not win.
    2) you can not draw.
    3) you can not leave the play.

    Greetings,

    Antonio, from Malaga (Spain)

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