If you’ve been reading my blog for a while, you would notice that I always end it with the friendly “Feel free to post comments” ending. Unfortunately, at least for the time being, that is no more. You see, I’ve just been hit with the latest round of what is known as “comment spamming” in the blog world.

If you’re wondering what “comment spamming” is, I’ll explain it for you. Recently, I’ve received a number of random comments on random blog updates. The contents don’t amount to much, and are actually relatively harmless. I’ve received comments such as ‘very nice blog’ or ‘thanks for the information’, or ‘realy [sic] nice site’ which seem harmless, but the troubling thing is that they come through random Hotmail or Yahoo Mail accounts with names like “zwlrsa” or “prscwe” that are the hallmark of spam-botters.

My mother’s blog has been having the same troubles. Yesterday, she received about fifty different spam comments. She e-mailed some people about it and came across a person who had the same problem. Apparently the only way that he gets by is with the aid of a comment filtering system. His advice was to immediately terminate the commenting option. My mother recommended that I turn off comments, but I was skeptical. That is, until I found the half dozen spam comments that collected in my inbox in the course of about four hours. Apparently, at peak, the spambots can churn out, at full speed, over 1200 comment spams per hour.

So until we find a way to put a stop to these spam comments, we’ll just have to make do without comments. If you have advice on the comment spamming situation or if you want to just say hey now that the comments are off, send to willraus at earthlink dot net.

Until next time…