You know when you think you have had a great idea and then you find that you were probably very wrong? Well after my last post Comments please? I am beginning to regret turning the bloody things on.
Since the comments page went live I have received three comments for each of the last two entries. I was really pleased when I saw the comment count and wondered what people could be finding to say about my words. In short the answer is nothing – it is a new (to me) form of on-line spam where on-line gambling services flood blogs with links to their sites. And I do mean flood – there was pages of it.
Searching on good old Google I find, of course, that I am not the only one to be plagued by this latest intrusion. What’s worse is that none of those writing about the problem had found any ways of reliably preventing the spammers.
So, for now, I have left the comments on but have disabled the ability to post any html at all, have blocked the IP addresses of the posts received so far and have started a banned word list. None of which will stop the spammer that wants to get though as they will simply find another way.
If I find a solution that works with Greymatter I will post it and if you find a solution leave a comment and maybe I might notice it in amongst all the spam…
Look out for a piece of code called captcha. If your blog dont support it, you could change to one that does or re-google it, someone may have coded it into greymatter.
Thanks for the suggestion Steve. You will see that I have opted for the slightly lower-tech option at this stage to see if this thwarts the bastard spammers. If it is successful I will post the code so that others can make the change too.
It does, of course, also assume that people know what colour oranges are too;-)
That should do the trick