10 November 2007

Bloggers beware!

Some inconsiderate peabrain has been heinously using a bot to SPAM-comment on my other [real-life] blog. I have received literally thousands of comments, almost 10,000 so far. Fortunately I turned on comment moderation after receiving between 1,000 and 2,000 of these, each of which I now have to delete individually. After turning on comment moderation, I received another 7,500 or so, each of which has to be rejected. This part at least I can do 300 at a time, although several times I accidentally clicked on Publish rather than Reject, giving myself almost 1,000 more that I will have to individually delete. I hope I didn't accidentally reject any real comments while doing so. After a while, the mind turns to mush, looking at all these repeating comments with their links to sex sites and sites hawking Viagra, Cialis and who knows what other crap. And while I'm busy doing this, at least half my mind turns to dreaming up horrible punishments that I'd like to inflict on the kind of person that does this.

So, before this happens to YOU, turn on comment moderation. Do it now! Learn from my misfortune. This particular bot was posting an average of over 100 SPAM comments per hour. It doesn't take long for any particular blog to be overwhelmed. It makes dealing with Mickey seem like a walk in the park.



Updated 4 hours later:

I should have also changed my comments settings to require word verification. Doh! That's the whole point of this setting—to prevent bots from posting comments. I am really getting on in years, at least mentally.

5 comments:

Anybeth said...

Thanks for the warning. I'm still pretty new to this blog thing, and Mickey was enough of a pain in my butt, I don't need more cleaning up to do.

awannabe said...

Thanks for warning me.

I've gotten 1 spam comment (just last week) in the 10 months I have been blogging.

WendyB said...

Oh my gosh! So you didn't have word verification on when this happen? I hope that helps a little at least. Is there some way to make Blogger deal with your spam removal? This scares me!

Anonymous said...

ya know.... wordpress has spam but it's not nearly as bad as blogspot.

i'm trying to convert everyone to wordpress. why? b/c it makes my life easier is all :) and that is what life all about right? hee....

i used to blogspot but i left for wordpress.

Mary P Jones (MPJ) said...

Ack! What a hassle! I've had moderation and word verification on all along, but that's more because I'm a control freak than anything else. ;)