comment spam

If you read my earlier post on comment spam you will know that I've been battling it all weekend. From Friday to Sunday I had over 2,000 spam comments and the process to remove them is wholly manual. There is an IP blocking feature, but it's hardly reliable considering that IP addresses can be changed at whim, or just spoofed if they are hardcore spammers. At any rate, it's the best that I can do at this point, at least until Six Apart comes up with some tools to combat spamming. I did email the tech support people and they said that they catch between 5-10k spam comments a day, which makes me wonder how they missed the couple thousand that made it to my blog... I mean, after all, they were entirely porn related and my blog is not what would be called "racey".

The blog tool vendors must work on features for combating blog spam. In the meantime, I removed the "recent comments" part of the main page, figuring that I shouldn't subject you to stuff that is pretty offensive. Unfortunately, I cannot globally turn off commenting so I'll have to continue manually deleting comment spam. Fortunately, it's tapered off in the last day, there were only 80 spam comments this morning when I checked.

The really sad thing is that I'm seeing from my referral log that people (aka "sick _ucks") actually search for this stuff with Google, et. al.