Paul's Comments

Some people (and I use that term rather loosely) using a bunch of multiple subdomains from various domains in mainland China under the .CN domain are posting lots of website addresses for various garbage sites. At least this makes sense, they're trying to scam people for money or to lead them to porn sites either to sell porn or possibly load malware on people's computers.

Temporarily I am locking this site down so that comments cannot be posted. Since all comments have to be validated by me anyway before anyone can see them, I get a message in e-mail telling me about them. Yesterday I estimate I got over 100 messages. So I've disabled comments until I figure out how to fix it.

There are some things that immediately tell you someone is a spammer. Any e-mail with an address in the domain name "virgilio.it" is automatically a spammer. And it looks like virtually every comment posted here is one, and definitely any that end in .CN. So either I'll disable posting of URLs in comments or tell it to automatically discard any comment with a URL ending in .CN.

Come to think of it, there's really no reason for someone to post an URL in a comment, so if I can find the code where that appears, I can block it. Posting a plain URL without it being turned into a link does the spammers no good. Or use it to refuse their message AND lock them out so they can never post again. Maybe, but I'm not sure. But for right now, I want to stop having to clean up any more spam comments until I delete the remaining ones, which amount to a lot, I can't even guess how many, it seems like thousands.