Sunday, October 02, 2005

one step closer to banning comments

Not because of anything my human commenters have done, but because I finally suffered an onslaught of comment spam-- seven in the space of a few hours. I had thought that my archaic template would have made me immune, but I was wrong. Apparently, some fuckers do take the time to rifle through your blog, learn how to insert comments and then, like the pepsis wasp laying eggs inside a paralyzed tarantula, slip their evil comment spam into old and recent posts.

I've instituted the Blogger comment verification feature, which involves typing in a random sequence of letters to confirm that you're not of an alien species. If the spammers are determined (and they must be: they learned how to post comments to my blog!), they'll play along and type in the random sequence as well. Here's hoping, though, that the extra work will deter them.

If, however, I continue to receive comment spam, I'm going to turn the comments feature off. My apologies to all the folks who've contributed comments during the brief time I've had the feature on.


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7 comments:

Jelly said...

Awwwwww! Please let me know if the password thingie works against spamification, ok?

Anonymous said...

Kevin,

The comment verification feature should do the trick...if not 100%, then it should at least slow them down to a manageable trickle. Here's hoping you keep comments on!

Lorianne said...

Yes, the word verification should work. What I find interesting (despicable, really, but in an interesting way) is that the phenomenon of *Blogger* blogs being vulnerable to comment spam is a new-ish phenomenon. Last fall, none of my writing students had trouble with comment spam on their Blogger blogs....but this fall, it's definitely been a problem for those student who don't have word verification.

Kevin Kim said...

So far, so good, but the previous slew of spam arrived while I was asleep. I'll be curious to see what I wake up to tomorrow morning (it's about 9:20PM on Sunday, Seoul time, as I write this).


Kevin

Jason said...

Great blog! It sounds like you have a problem with maintaining erections. Visit my blog to see how you can stop making a laughingstock of yourself!

Kevin Kim said...

Jason, you punk, that's not fucking funny.

By the way, in that Blogger profile shot, is that you wearing the green shawl over your head?

Heh,


Kevin

Maven said...

:) I'm another proponent of the word verification:)

It works to cut down on the spammers.