I’ve been fighting a low-grade bush war against comment spam for months and I’m finally at the end of my rope. (If you don’t know, comment spam is basically the same thing as email spam, except it infests the comment threads on innocent blogs such as Simple Tricks and Nonsense.) At first it was just a trickle of Cialis ads, between one and three a day. Annoying, but nothing that couldn’t be cleaned up easily. Lately, however, I’ve been besieged by gambling-related spam, and this stuff is much more aggressive that any I’ve seen before. Last night, I spent an hour deleting a single day’s worth of comments left by “online poker,” “clay poker chips,” “monogrammed poker chips,” and, the worst, most prolific offender of them all, “texas holdem.” Enough already!<\/p>\n
I briefly considered disabling ALL<\/i> commenting on this site in order to stop these bastards, but I believe the nuclear option is always your last option, and besides, one of the biggest pleasures I get from running this blog is the feedback from my three loyal readers. So, here’s the compromise deal I came up with:<\/p>\n
I’ve already closed the comment threads on those entries that seem to be “attractive nuisances.” (Oddly enough, the filthy little Cylons that generate these foul deposits seem drawn to any entry that mentions Abu Ghraib or Spider-Man. I’d like to know what twisted machine logic equates those two subjects with poker.) Also, since the spam seems to appear mostly with older entries, I further intend to close the comments on all the entries from last year when I get the time to do it. And finally, in the future, I plan to close all open comment threads at the end of each month, so don’t delay in leaving your thoughts while the entries are fresh.<\/p>\n
I hate to do this because people do occasionally remark on older entries, but like I said, I just don’t have the time or patience to keep playing this game. It’s ridiculous that I have to look for ways not<\/i> to play it; one of these days, I’m going to do an entry on how unchecked marketing is draining the vitality from our culture. In the meantime, I’m hoping my plan will curb a lot of the spam activity. If you have a thought you’d like to express on an entry that’s already been closed, please feel free to email me.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I’ve been fighting a low-grade bush war against comment spam for months and I’m finally at the end of my rope. (If you don’t know, comment spam is basically the same thing as email spam, except it infests the comment threads on innocent blogs such as Simple Tricks and Nonsense.) At first it was just […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-164","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-site-issues"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/164","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=164"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/164\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=164"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=164"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=164"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}