The spambots have found this blog and have started using the commenting mechanism to exploit it for their own use. After taking a brief look at the advice in the WordPress documentation for dealing with such annoyances, I’ve disabled the commenting mechanism altogether. It wasn’t getting much use anyway–which is understandable, since this blog itself doesn’t get much use–and my enthusiasm for trying to deal with comment spam in a less heavy-handed way was completely dampened by the following passage from the documentation:
Comment spam is a fact of life if you have a blog. Using WordPress, you have not only solid built-in tools to prevent comment spam, there are also a wide range of comment spam protection and defense plugins and methods to choose from.
There is no “one size fits all” method that will protect your comments; spammers use many tactics. Consider using multiple defenses. Remember spammers change the way they attack so you must keep your choices updated.
Sorry, but I really have better things to do with my time than play cat-and-mouse games with spammers.
It’s getting to the point at which it’s almost not worth running a website like this one. I spent an hour this weekend installing security updates for Gallery, the photo gallery software. These updates were made in response to the discovery by an independent auditing firm that Gallery has (had, rather) minor and as-yet-unexploited security flaws. The authors of Gallery fixed the flaws and issued an announcement for the update. That’s all fine and dandy, but one has to wonder whether it would have made more sense to not say anything at all about the flaws, since they hadn’t yet been exploited and announcing their presence virtually guarantees that they will be exploited.
In any case, I’ll see how things go now. If it turns out yet again that someone exploits my site because WordPress (or Gallery) is vulnerable to such things, I’ll probably give up on active-content sites altogether and go back to old-fashioned plain-vanilla HTML. That means that this blog will go away and this site (or rather its replacement) will be updated even less often than it currently is or has been in the past. I have too many other things vying for my time and attention; I will concede defeat at the hands of greed-driven spammers. The internet continues to reflect the real world: through greed and stupidity, a minority of people are ruining it for the rest of us.
