Spam Storm!

Over the past two days, the blog here has been under the effects of a spam storm. Over 200 spam com­ments were blocked and ulti­mate­ly delet­ed in that peri­od, the most in all of the his­to­ry of the blog. All of these spam com­ments were designed to pro­mote just one web­site, a blank page designed to dri­ve clicks to a ran­dom har­vest­ing site.

Its hard to fig­ure out whether there was any kind of intel­li­gence to the storm: the spam was quite easy to detect, as there were only two or three dif­fer­ent com­ment text blocks in use. They all also used much the same pitch to attract clicks to the har­vest­ing site, a rather come on toward blog own­ers to increase their cash­flow return from the blog through the use of a tech­nique that I won’t men­tion by name because I don’t want it to show up in web search­es, which is also why I’m not list­ing the har­vest­ing web­site, either. It was also pret­ty appar­ent that at least one of the text blocks was by some­one with a lim­it­ed knowl­edge of Eng­lish, whether just by lack of edu­ca­tion or if Eng­lish was not their pri­ma­ry language.

How­ev­er, to cut down on that spam storm, just so that I don’t have to keep clean­ing it out of the queue because it always gets caught, I have turned on the require­ment that only reg­is­tered mem­bers can com­ment. That should­n’t be a prob­lem as the reg­u­lar com­menters are already registered.