Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr
God damn spammers. They keep coming back. I’m having to spend two hours a day cleaning the god damn ads for viagra and xanax and the rest of it out of old comments. Miserable blood-sucking bastards.
[beats head against wall until the blood runs]
Well if you will keep signing up to penis-expansion websites, what do you expect?!
I’d switch to gmail if I were you, it hardly misses any spam…
No, spam here, not in my email. Spammers hit the comments.
And they all use gmail addresses.
Gmail filters all the spam, but then you have to check the gmail spam filter several times a day because gmail sometimes filter emails that I want to read. I try to block them completely but the bastards change their email addresses several times a day. The only solution is to find Terry Eagleton’s email address and forward all the spam to him.
No no no this isn’t spam coming to email, it’s spam that comes here – to comments on certain old posts – hundreds and hundreds of them every day. It takes forever to delete them from the database, 30 rows at a time. I can’t block it, there’s nothing I can do about it.
That’s a shame. Maybe in the long run it might be better to switch to a discussion group, like those which Yahoo offers, which you have to sign into. I think that Google also offers discussion groups. The website could continue as it is, with a link to the discussion group.
OB –
I’m no expert in these matters, but at least one other website I frequent, which has a comments section kind of like this, requires you to sign in by typing in an auto-generated picture of some numbers and letters that the spambots can’t read. Maybe someone can help you get that set up for B&W.
-CM
I think that’s called a captcha. I’ve also seen websites that generate a simple maths question for you to answer before you can comment.
Have you ever thought that you could transfer the ‘note & comments’ section to a free blog-hosting service like blogger or wordpress? They have auto-spam-filtering, captchas, etc, built in. You could keep the old archives separately, but cut off new commenting, so there’d be no new spam to hunt. I believe you can even have the blog under your own domain-name.
Meanwhile, please do try not to damage your head. I’m sure all us folks here agree it’s a far too valuable resource to lose… ;-)
“God damn spammers”. Why are you invoking God if you don’t believe in him?
“… please do try not to damage your head…”
Or, failing that, let us chip in for some kind of crash helmet you could always put on just before you switch on the computer.
On blogger I read a lot swears by Akismet spam-filtering software. He claims it catches several thousand spam comments a day (he recently passesd the million-spam watershed!). Might be worth looking into.
Otherwise, try setting up old, inactive threads to lock down? Maybe with a wall somewhere that late commenters can contribute to or something.
I use the captcha stuff on mine. Works. I don’t get much spam to clean out of comments. Some of the truly determined actually seem to employ human drone types to put them in by hand, so I get the odd one (or, now and then, something like a dozen) to contend with. Clean it out, they seem to give up for a while.
But yeah, they’re bloodsucking bastards.
Yes, I have thought of the free blog-hosting transfer. Might do that. Thanks, all.
Delurking.
Sorry, but the bastards are STILL at it.
I just got a wierd pop-up claiming that “B&W” was a “Known phishing page”.
Is this a deliberate attack, I wonder?
My sympathies, and hope that you can clean them out.
Ew. Thanks for the info. That is very bizarre…