My Blog is Still under Attack
Recently I wrote that my blog is under attack by spam comments. Most of the comments were caught by my spam-filter Akismet, the best-known filter for WordPress. I was receiving about 50,000 comments a day and 200 of them were sneaking through this filter. I had to moderate those and delete them. This was an extreme waste of my time. But I can understand that the bots achieved some goal. None of their comments made it to my website, but at least I myself was made aware of opportunities for hair removal in Florida.
The comments crashed my server and I had to install CAPTCHAs. I was happy that the number of comments that I had to moderate went down, but the total number of comments was still so high that my server kept crashing. Now that the comments are blocked from human view, why are they still pouring in? One software package is trying to inform the other software package about weight-loss wonder drugs. I am convinced that Akismet is not interested.
My hosting provider couldn’t handle the traffic and asked me to upgrade to a more advanced hosting package. It’s annoying that I have to pay a lot of money for these bots’ attempts to sell Akismet fake Louis Vuitton bags.
The upgrade was too expensive, so I tried a different solution. I closed comments for older posts. It didn’t help. The bad software continued trying to leave comments that can’t be left. They especially like my post about Cech cycles, called A Mysterious Bracelet. My weblog tells me that every second someone downloads this page and tries to leave a comment. But no one will ever see these comments. Even Akismet will never know what it is missing: it might have had a chance to make $5,000 a day from home.
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