Month: December 2004

Attention comment spammers

(and human readers of this blog)
Comments are now disabled. Enjoy!

Just took a peek at the comments left on me blog since the last time I deleted all the spam (a little over a month ago), and wow .. there were over 3000 comments added to almost 800 posts (out of the total 1140 entries I’ve made).

Some stats:

  • 1376 comments came from one IP address .. that’s over 40% of the total spam.
  • The top 20 spammers accounted for about 85% of the crap (about 2800 comments).

I could go on and on about how much this pisses me off, but I’ve wasted enough time. agh.

So I’ve turned off comments until I have time to deal with this properly. Old comments are still there, and will be visible again someday after I’ve deleted all the pink gooey canned meat that’s now mixed in with the real comments. I know there are already several ways to fight comment spam, but I just don’t have the time right now to find one I like and make it work with my current setup. I s’pose I should’ve done this after I deleted the first round of spam.. oh, well. Meanwhile, if you have an actual comment, email me, blog it, link back here, phone me, aim me, whatever .. i’ll find it and manually add it or link back. Yeah, I’m sorry, that sucks, but I’m sick of deleting the crap. Besides, people have stopped commenting here anyway 😉

Link Harvesting

Just commented on Jeremy Zawodny’s post URL extraction from email .. might as well post my thoughts here too:

I started doing something similar a few weeks ago: I have a procmail rule that greps URLs out of emails from people I know (to avoid the spam) and turns them into posts in a private blog. I also grab links that I send or receive through AIM or ICQ or IRC (using aimsniff and dircproxy) and turn those into linkblog posts as well, but in separate categories. I should probably condense all that into a nice package and release it sometime .. 🙂
Also have a javascript linklet (one of the few bookmarks that I copy to all
the computers I use) that lets me directly add and categorize whatever
page I happen to be viewing.

So when I’m trying to remember where on the web
I saw something, I load up my linkbin page and use blosxom’s search function.

He takes it a bit farther — tie it into del.icio.us and let other people categorize/tag the links for you. That’d be nice…