Wednesday, November 11, 2009

Comment verification back on

With sadness I've turned comment verification back on. I find it annoying and had lived successfully without it for a couple of years with only an occasional spam comment which I deleted. However, overnight, I've received over 350 new auto-generated comments with links in Chinese characters. I don't have the time to fight this battle manually.

In a fallen world, some doors need locks.

UPDATE: Just in the time it took to write this post (which I wrote before actually turning comment verification back on), I received another 100 comments.

2nd update: Now I have over 700 spam comments. I have turned on comment moderation for comments on posts older than 14 days. I'm curious, how many of my readers can read Chinese characters? If I go by the reader stats that I very rarely look at, less than 1% of my readers are from China.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Thanks Byron. Many of those spam comments were also coming through into my inbox, presumably because I'd once left a comment on the related post and ticked the 'email follow-up comments' box. Glad to know it's sorted.

Matthew Moffitt said...

I got the spam too on posts where I wanted to be followed up.

byron smith said...

If there is a spike in my blogstats today, it is because I decided to manually go through and remove this spam from all my posts, starting in 2006. I'm up to halfway through 2008, and the whole process of doing this is (as expected) taking a little time, but is also giving me a chance to re-read a whole lot of old thoughts.