Tim
Life is good
Joined: Nov 2007
Location: Kalamazoo
Comment Spam
An end to comments
Since late on 11-29 the site has been bombarded with comment spam. To quantify it, it's received 339 spam comments. Because of this I've taken drastic steps and completly removed the ability to comment from the site. Not all comments were able to make it through my basic spam filter, but about 24% of all the unsolicited comments were able to make it and had the potential to appear on the site.
I will be reviewing the site and adding additional measures to ensure this cannot happen again. Or at least not until the dirty spammers are able to kill my spam trap again.
Update 12-5:
On 12-3 I disabled all ability to add comments until I was able to properly review the comment system. I did a quick review on 12-4 and made it so all comments were needing to be approved prior to being visible on the site.
While this approach works, it still adds more work. So I've now made is so you must be a member of the site to leave comments. This is only temporary and will be lifted once the firestorm of spam has run it's course.