The AVC blog has been hit with a rash of comment spam in the past several weeks. Every day we take down at least five or ten of these annoying things. And some days, we take down a lot more.
The “we” is me, William, and Shana. I really appreciate their help with this chore. They’ve been helping me moderate and manage the comments here at AVC for several years now. It’s an unpaid and mostly unnoticed job. I really appreciate their help on it.
I honestly don’t understand why these spammers do this. The Disqus system has its own filters and very little of it actually gets through and into the comments. And the stuff that does get through gets taken down by us.
These past few weeks has been particularly bad. I am not sure if the problem is an increase in spam attacks or some sort of change in the Disqus filters. But whatever is causing the increase in spam, it’s pissing me off.
If you leave comments here regularly, you will certainly have experienced getting a reply that is spam. So you know how I feel about this stuff.
One of the many reasons I moved away from Typepad comments and to Disqus back in 2007 was to manage comment spam. I could not manage it on Typepad and the old AVC comments were full of the stuff. That’s why I left all of those old comments behind on Typepad when I moved to WordPress. I am not going to let that happen again.
The fight against The Internet Axis Of Evil never stops but it does change. When I wrote that post a decade ago, it was mostly about email spam and viruses. I don’t think so much about those scourges now. We’ve moved on to getting hacked and DDOS’ed and worse. The good thing about the Internet is you can do what you want on it. The bad thing about the Internet is you can do what you want on it.
So if you’ve noticed an increase in comment spam recently, you are correct in your observation. We are taking it down as fast as it comes in. Maybe the spammers will move on to somewhere more fruitful for them. Or maybe Disqus will tighten their filters a bit. Either way, we are going to keep this bar clean of that stuff. I promise you that.
