meta blogging
There was this moment not so long ago when I was getting weary of keeping up this blog. The comment spam was getting to me, and q quick calcuation showed that it was averaging about one per minute. It got to a point where I had to make sure to log onto the Internet every so often to clear the deck — something I didn’t want to do, necessarily, and a signal that I was scheduling life around this blog instead of the other way around.
Then… it slowed down. I was happy. I asked my brother if he did anything, but never received a response. It was just as well, only because it was a temporary lull — caused by what, I do not know, and just a couple days later — I was barraged, BARRAGED, and I can not overstate the word barraged by a massive flow from one url that sent variations of “dating” spam-site, with any number of adjectives and city and demographic before “dating”. It came at me seemingly 4 per minute. I suppose it was easy enough to stop that one, because I just had to ban the isp — I have rediscovered the “Ban the ISP” page, which I do on a regular basis in scanning to see if any isp pops up a few times (the spammers generally can escape this purview quite easily, but ah well). But then delete thousands of email messages from the server.
This is all for the pleasure of a mere 2 or 3 comments per month, perhaps. But I am not going to have a blog without commenting capability — indeed, in those two or three comments per months have — for example — been grist for a university newspaper’s article (which I guess I should go back and check on how that one is moving).
The spam comments are more or less managable at the moment. But that seems to be subject to change at the whim of the scum of the earth known as spammers.
I guess this is to stop shortly. The blog pages at struat.com — my brother’s “Beans for Breakfast” and “Using Books” page and this page — are changing servers. I hope the new feature has a “type the characters seen here” feature.