The Dynamic Duo

I’m so mad I can hardly type (no, I mean worse than usual) at the moment. I’m extremely busy with work, and with the unannounced fact that I will be someone’s husband as of next Friday, and I just don’t have time to delete, much less combat, the onslaught of spam comments that have been hitting this website over the past few days. Up to this point, MT Blacklist had been doing a reasonable job of keeping comment spam to a dull roar and I was dutifully deleting and blacklisting what did get through. Unfortunately MT Blacklist stopped being developed in October of last year, and I can not figure out how to block a pattern that I’m seeing in the spam that should be extremely simple.

So it is with great regret that I close comments on all but the most recent of posts, a measure that will remain in place until I have the time to migrate this site over to a different content management system; something that I don’t foresee happening in the immediate future. When I do change tools I will try to do it with a minimum of disturbance to you the user, and most importantly, YOU the UltraMom who posts here most frequently. For now though, most comments occur on recent posts anyway so it shouldn’t really affect anyone, it’s mostly just the principal of the matter. Anyway, I’ll refrain from making my own, but rest assured I wholeheartedly agree with all the sentiments I’ve read over the years wishing harm, bad health, and trouble with the law to spammers.

P.S. If we were, through some bizarre twist, forced to look on the bright side, we might say that our webserver not having to check thousands of comment attempts against 3,000 anti-spam patterns might make the site a bit more responsive.

P.P.S. The spam comments were in fact SO easy to pick out that I was able to delete all but three of them in a matter of seconds with a direct SQL statement to the database. That makes it all the more frustrating that I can’t make mt-blacklist do it.