Prepoceros

If you pay attention to the ‘Recent Comments’ section, perhaps you’ve noticed that I’ve been getting tons of comment spam lately. This hasn’t been a big problem for most of the last twelve months, but in the last week or so I’ve been getting maybe fifty fake comments a day, and it’s a bitch to go through and clean them all out.

Unfortunately, to keep the spammers out of my face, I’m going to have to mildly inconvenience some of you nice people along the way. I’ve switched the comment settings so that it sends each commenter’s first comment to moderation. If I deem your comment worthy to appear on this hallowed page (the bar is really low here, folks—all you have to do is not be a dirty spammer), then you are considered an “approved” commenter and may comment freely for all eternity.

I don’t know whether those of you who have commented on previous posts will be labeled “approved” or whether your first comment will go into the moderation queue. If you’d like to use this post to test that out, go nuts. Let me know what happens.

I’m sorry to do this, and maybe I’ll be so sorry that I’ll switch back to open commenting in the future. I *could* block individual spammers as they come up, but that feels like a stopgap solution. Right now I have more new spammers than new commenters, so I think this will save time on my end. Spambots are poo-heads.

Tags: blogging

This entry was posted on Monday, July 24th, 2006 at 3:59 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.