Comment Spam
Posted by Pierre Igot in: BloggingMay 19th, 2006 • 1:20 pm
I am afraid I have to report that I have been bombarded with comment spam in the past couple of days.
This has forced me to implement additional tools designed to help prevent this kind of problem. One of the tools I have installed requires JavaScript to be on, but I think that shouldn’t be problem, since I already make use of JavaScript elsewhere on the site.
While things appear to be working fine now (and the flood of spam has mercifully stopped), I cannot be entirely sure that everything is OK for every Betalogue reader. So if you experience any problems while visiting the site or while trying to submit legitimate comments, please let me know by clicking on the “Contact the Author” link on the side or e-mailing me at webmaster (at) my domain name.
May 20th, 2006 at May 20, 06 | 3:41 pm
I thought one had to be a registered member of Betalogue to leave comments? Did you have a mass bot registration?
May 20th, 2006 at May 20, 06 | 3:42 pm
Also, I got a PHP/MySQL connection failure when I tried to submit the above comment. It seems to have resolved itself, but it’s something to keep an eye out for.
May 20th, 2006 at May 20, 06 | 4:55 pm
You have to be registered to be able to manually submit comments, but you don’t need to be registered to send a trackback. All trackbacks automatically go to the moderation queue, unless you can get spam filters that nuke the bad ones. Unfortunately, all the tools that I have installed so far have failed.
(It’s hard to imagine how a registration mechanism could be implemented for trackbacks, although ultimately that’s what would be needed.)
As for the PHP/MySQL connection failure, it’s a separate problem. It has to do with my host’s SQL server, which seems to be somewhat unresponsive at times. I have complained about it, but they have yet to fix the problem properly. I guess I have to complain some more. When you get a failure, usually the comment is saved just the same, so you shouldn’t have to resubmit it—although I am not sure about that.