My failure of late to blog consistently has been matched by a similar laziness in prosecuting the war on spam here at locussolus. In the past couple months the comment threads of posts long archived have been overwhelmed with advertisements, mostly for penis enlargement. Barrett of Too Many Chefs wrote yesterday to say he's closed down certain comment threads altogether on order to avoid all the spam, which would be a reasonable enough solution for me if I had the time to go through all 1000+ old posts and "fix" them. But doing so piecemeal just leaves me unsatisfied and depressed.
The latest version of MT might offer a solution, but the free version probably won't meet my needs, and the price is awfully steep for a blog I haven't even been maintaining. Plus I think requiring comment registration is overkill -- wouldn't a global comment editing mode like the current "power editing" for posts or even a feature that automatically closed comment threads after a certain date make all this management pretty easy? Maybe not for the big fish, but certainly for me.
Anyway, the point is that I've mostly given up for now... I'm not going to waste any more of my time cleaning up old comment threads, and I'm not going to worry about what's posted there. If you see an ad for penis enlargement, please be aware that it does not come from me... I'm washing my hands of it.
Oh, and one other thing. I happened on this bit of information via a friend in the business -- it's the phone number of Scott Richter, who I'm told is responsible for a lot of the email spam having to do with penis enlargement. I've never called the number, but I publish it here for your personal edification, and as compensation for my unwillingness to delete comment spam in the future: (303) 464-8164. Have fun...
It's really bad on Matthew Yglesias, with his sidebar that lists the most recent comments posted. It's usually a decent way to keep track of updates if I've posted to more than one thread at about the same time, but now it's frequently filled by spam on old posts.
Paul, install mt-blacklist. It works like a charm and will scan your entire archives in one fell swoop and eliminate comment spam. plus, you can check your activity logs every morning and count the number of blocked comments.
Really, it's like magic.
Thanks for the suggestion apostropher. I'll give that a try...
Post a comment