Spam-spewing creeps

If you've tried to leave a journal comment here recently, you've probably received a somewhat confusing message about spam, servers, and moveable type. You might be wondering what it all means:

Have you, as a visitor, somehow broken the page?

Have the authorities finally caught up with me and shut down my site?

Is this some kind of horrible virus that will eventually bring the internet to its electronic knees?

No, no, and maybe.

I use a truly amazing service called Movable Type to upload and maintain the journal section of my website. It allows me to update the page from any computer, anywhere there is an internet connection. It also allows you to post comments, questions, jokes, threats, and other pithy remarks to the journal entries. Cool, eh?

Unfortunately, for every brilliant new technology designed to foster communication and build community, there exists a handful of dirtbags willing to exploit it for financial gain.

These lowlifes (will all due respect to amoebas, plankton, and protozoa) create programs to spam other people's sites with phony comments. They include a link to their own pornography, gambling, or drug sites so that their Google search ranking will improve. (An important factor in how Google ranks websites is how many other internet sites link to them.)

Sadly, these perverse programs can add unwanted comments to hundreds of journal entries in a matter of minutes. Not only is it painfully time-consuming to remove these spam comments, but they also play havoc on the servers that host our pages.

I have been attacked a number of times in the past, but was lucky enough to catch and block the bums before much damage was done. As a preventative measure (you might have already noticed) I now close all but the five most recent journal entries for comments.

Which is sad, because it means that new visitors can't add their thoughts to any of the previous articles or entries. Worse yet, I imagine that many bloggers (online journal keepers) simply decide that it is simply not worth the hassle and pull the plug on their sites.

My site wasn't affected by the latest round of attacks, but I guess that others on my server were. Hopefully they'll resume the service soon, and you'll be able to leave comments again. (You don't know how much I miss them!)

Until then I guess it'll just have to communicate via the "old-fashioned" email...