I knew that having a blog that supported comments was going to invite spam, I just never expected it to be like this. Up until last weekend, it was pretty benign: a few trying to post ads, a few muttering nonsense. Harmelss little things that popped up once in a while.
I woke up on Tuesday morning to find 37 new messages in my inbox. Surely they couldn’t all be Amazon ads. Over the last three days I’ve been hammered with over 100 spam comments. And they’re all the same thing: all “people” with legit looking information and a silly message about how much they like my site. Only most of the messages are in broken English, and often they’ll say “what a great read that was” on a post that’s just an image. Also, the website of evey one of them ended with a 2K. While I knew they were all fake, that would have been the tip-off for someone less in-the-know.
So I’ve rigged my system so that you have to sign up to comment. I know that will dissuade real random visitors from commenting, but it must be done. It takes a long time to trash all those alert emails. I’ll try to find a better way, but for now that’s the best compromise I have between legions of spambots and disabling comments completely.
It makes me wonder though, what is the point of this kind of spam? There are no penis enlargement ads. Maybe the sites they claim to be from contain malicous things, but who clicks on those anyway? It’s pointless aside from wasting my time. Unless of course wasting my time is the point. In which case: well played, spammers. Well played.