Ace

Comment Spam

June 20, 2004

I got up this morning to find some comment spam in some old posts. (You’d know it if you saw it. It’s just a another way of attracting visitors to the same sites that email spam does.) I’ve deleted it. This just happens and there are various ways of dealing with it, but I’ve found the most successful — because they tend to go for old posts where it’s less likely to noticed by the site owner — is just to close comments after a short period of time. I’ve been doing that anyway, but I’ve got a bit slack lately.

I’ve now closed all posts composed before the beginning of June, except Dave Lloyd’s Avila Trail 45K Ultra and Mick’s head-expansion, though this won’t be forever.

This isn’t in any way an attempt to covertly stifle debate, merely necessary self-defence.

I may as well turn this into an all-out rant against all the spam I get elsewhere.

Because I track where visitors come from, I get a lot of clowns pinging my pages with headers saying they came from this or that porn site. The really stupid thing is that they visit pages which don’t exist so they don’t show up as visitors. And if they read the robots.txt file, they’d know that search engine crawlers aren’t allowed to index the referrers page anyway, so it wouldn’t do them any good.

I hate wasting bandwidth on these pirates and I ban them every time I find them, but they’re like cockroaches and keep coming back.

Posted by Dave at June 20, 2004 10:48 AM

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