Further proof that my voodoo dolls are defective: Spammers have discovered the blog.
Luckily I get notified of post replies by email so the average lifespan of one of these parasitic posts can be measured in minutes (the last one lasted about ten seconds). Pity the lifespan of the parasites themselves couldn’t be measured the same way.
Anyway, not that there’s been overwhelming use of the “Reply” feature (which is fine; the logs say that people are reading if not commenting), if the spam gets too bad I’ll have to put some sort of barrier in the way– a login or membership requirement or some such.
Apologies in advance. There are always some people who will abuse and ruin what other people have built and see nothing wrong with doing so.
Followup: I modified the system to filter on a fairly comprehensive set of spam attributes; so far it’s been 100%. So once a week or so I’ll have to take out the trash, but the spam shouldn’t appear anymore.
Followup 2: I went ahead and turned off comments for a while (again, not like anyone but the spammers were using them). We’ll see if that decreases the load a bit.
Spammers suck. Seems that if we just dunked a couple of them upside down in a vat of camel snot, the rest would think twice.