Last week, the spambots hit my blog in force. Thousands of spam comments in a short period; enough of a load on the server that Pair (my web host) automatically shut off access to my blog's database. The nice Pair tech support guy re-enabled access, but before I could get into the system to turn off commenting, the bots slammed it again.<\/p>\n
Eventually I got access for long enough to turn off comments; then I deleted the 300MB or so worth of spam comments (I didn't even look at them, just deleted them all).<\/p>\n
I decided to leave comments disabled for a couple days. And then I didn't get a chance to revisit that until tonight.<\/p>\n
Tonight, I re-enabled comments, and immediately three spam comments slipped through my spam filter. These are the anonymous spam that's been getting past my filter a lot lately, and I'm tired of having to delete them.<\/p>\n
So I've changed my settings: all unauthenticated comments now automatically go to moderation.<\/p>\n
I'm sorry about that; I've always liked allowing anonymous and otherwise unauthenticated comments. But for the duration of the current batch of spam, I don't think I'm up for allowing them without moderation. And I may have to turn off comments again altogether if I get hit by another DoS attack. (I don't think anyone's intentionally trying to DoS my blog, but the effect is the same regardless of intent.)<\/p>\n
So if you end up unable to comment here, I apologize. Most people who comment on my blog are doing so on Facebook these days anyway, but I'll be sad if I end up unable to allow comments here on my site. But we can burn that bridge when we come to it.<\/p>\n\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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