Paul's Comments

In a way, I have to say that the spammers have won. I have made the unfortunate decision to disable comments on my blog. As you might note in the sidebar, I am receiving hundreds of spams on here, so many that I've had to disable comments. I have, out of more than 500 items, ONE comment of any value. This means that one comment has stayed and hundreds and hundreds have had to be deleted.

It would be understandable if these people were spamming for some pay website or some redirect to a malware website that downloaded spyware or trojans or tried to cause your computer to dial a premium-rate 900 number or some overseas ripoff number. That doesn't make it right or acceptable, it just would explain why, e.g. they're spamming to scam money.

But a large number of them are nothing but junk comments that do nothing. Most consist of some reference to an e-mail address consisting of a two or three-digit number and a word, connected to a hotmail or gmail address, and the same word, with a different number, e.g. something like 193andrey@gmail.com, 116andrey@gmail.com, 27andrey@gmail.com, etc. And they sometimes point to nonexistent web sites (or clearly invalid references) on Google like http://www.google.com/hau/43/h . Maybe it's an attempt to pull a denial-of-service attack on Google, I don't know.

What I do know is I'm sick of cleaning up the mess of people who pollute my web space for absolutely no reason. And that means that I don't have to put up with it. I believe in free speech; I believe in it very strongly. I'd even be willing to accept comments to be posted here which disagreed with my opinions, even if the responder was insulting to me.

But I'm unwilling to accept being spammed by people who have nothing to say at all, or whose only purpose in entering the conversation is to destroy the conversation. I'm sorry it had to happen. What I might do is take a look at the code for b2evolution (the software I use to run this blog) to require that people either sign up for an account here to post comments (which may be overkill for a blog that probably has less than two dozen readers) or requiring that if you post a comment, you supply an e-mail address and get mailed a link to reply to that allows the comment to be published. I don't like this either - I dislike having to use a two-step process to make comments on other's blogs - but I don't see a choice. The only other choice I have is the one I am using now, which is to disable comments altogether.

So if you read this - or any of my other comments - and you want to write me a response, send it to paul@paul-robinson.us and if it is at all reasonable, I'll post it. Once I figure some way to allow people to post comments and disable spam, then I'll reinstate that feature. If I was getting reasonable comments and had a few pieces of spam, I'd live with it. But what I am getting is nothing but garbage. And I am not a garbage collector (my hard drive might disagree, but that's a different story!)