Well, I've gone to defcon 2 now. Last night I was making some template changes and noticed that the server was going ridiculously slow - sure enough, I was being commentspammed again. This time, I was able to spring into action and disable comments, but they were still hammering the 404 page to the point there the server was sluggish. I managed to stop them before I went past 252, which means I only had to delete 180 or so. I'm missing a perl module, so I was unable to install Blacklist to aid in the deletion.

I have now taken some of the (in hindsight elementary) measures to protect myself that are listed on countless popular blogs such as Yoz's. Yoz put together this really great list, and also gets my award for Best Blog Title I've Heard So Far Ever. It may be long, but it's comedy gold.

So, after renaming my comment script and breaking some stuff, I think I've now got everything pretty well back to normal for average users, but should provide me with a bit more shielding from google-happy spambots. Soon I'll be adding dummy forms to the comment pages to further confuse them.

It's a crappy measure, but I've implemented the throttling in MT 2.661. So, if you need to leave multiple comments, make sure there's 60 seconds of time between 'em. Wouldn't wanna get autobanned.

I hate this, but that's the price we pay for having a searchable index of pretty much all human knowledge. Google makes us all accessible and makes us all targets for people wanting to boost their ranking on Google. Ashes to ashes. The circle of life. The bitch is back.

But, the same thing that let these spam bots incest up my comments sections let me find about a hundred entries on how to deal with it, and generally enriches the life of the wired english-speaking world on a regular basis. So, we lump it. Google is still bad ass.

There's only gonna be one more entry before the redesign.

[it's curtains for yous]