By the way, if you have left a comment to this blog and noticed that it didn’t appear right away, it is because we are unfortunately moderating all comments due to recieving a great amount of blog comment spam (As an example, in one recent 24-hour period, we received over 35 bogus comments across a whole range of posts here). It truly is amazing the lengths the spammers will go to in order to increase the search engine ranking of their websites. The recent variants include some mundane comment as the text (such as “Great website. I learned a lot. Keep up the great work.”) but then put the spammer’s URL in the URL for the comment author (which we currently display). It’s a bit subtle in that at first glance you might want to approve the comment… until you look at the URL.
Anyway, we are going to keep moderation on until we get a chance to put in some type of CAPTCHA system or other way to prevent bots and scripts from injecting all these comments. And yes, we do realize that spammers are paying people to sit there and fill out comment fields, thereby defeating CAPTCHA tools… but hey, at least we would eliminate the automated spam – and it potentially forces spammers to lose some profit by paying people, which somehow doesn’t upset me at all. 🙂
And just to provide another data point… between last night at 10:30pm and this morning at 8:30am, 25 comments were submitted to a range of the blog postings here. Of those, exactly *1* was a real comment. The other 24 were spam.
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