So like lots of folks, I get a ton of spam everyday, though much of it is directed at my site in the form of comments. Thankfully WordPress has filters that prevent them from getting published instantly so instead they get sent directly to a moderation que for me to approve. The only downside of this is that the occasional legit comment will also get lumped with the spam (why this happens, I have no clue). So if you’ve ever written a comment but it didn’t show up after hitting the submit button, now you know why (and it should be there later on the day). But anyway, everytime a comment is posted, legit or spam, I get an email; I get about 60 or so over the course of a day, and I usually review all the day when I’m at my home Mac to clear out all the junk in the que and trash all the email notifications (I would manage the mail during the day, but the webmail from my host, 1&1, is a joke). Sometimes I’ll get lazy and let things build-up, in the que. Over the course of a weekend, I’ll have some 200 pieces of spam to junk; luckily I’ve never accidentally trashed a legit comment. But…
When I got home this past weekend, I opened up my email client and discovered that I had over 2000 pieces of mail. And about 1900 of that was spam comments at my site. When I went to the moderation que, there was so much crap that it would lock up my browser, both Safari & Firefox. It took some work, but I eventually found a way to clear it out, but it took fucking forever. It’s always a waste of time and energy to deal with spam, but now it’s getting ridiculous. Whatever douchebags that created methods to deploy such crap has found a work-around to the filers, and now I’m getting about an average of 30 spam comments literally every 5 minutes. And this has now made my already difficult to deal with webmail almost impossible to use. Plus, it even took down my site for an hour yesterday afternoon. Needless to say, I’m seriously pissed.
Aside from it being a hassle to manage, the spam is also hogging valuable traffic. Since this site began, I’ve had to deal with a gradually increasing bill from my host as more visitors become common. And while I normally don’t mind footing the bill if it’s real people, now it’s apparently going to cost me money, lots of money at the end of this billing cycle due to this bots or whatever that’s causing all the bullshit.
But now I’ve come to realize that with all the emails that’s bombarding my inbox will spam notifications, that messages from and to friends and colleagues are getting lost or bounced back. And now I’m fucking livid.
So basically:
1. For anyone else out there is using WordPress, I have to ask, are you having the same problems? And if so, how are you dealing with it? Is there a new plug-in that’s dealing with things? I’m not that savvy when it comes to web infra-structure, nor the WordPress scene, so any head’s up would be very appreciated.
2. And I know this sounds really gay, but is there any means to report these fuckers? One of the most annoying aspects is that a good deal of sites that are spamming me are no longer in service (they’re all GeoCities cites that were pulled for abusing their terms of services). But others are still functional, mostly bullshit online gambling sites.
3. Finally, to anyone who’s been trying to get ahold of me for the past few days and have been unsuccessful (and I’m finding out that its quite a few), please CC any emails to my PixelJump address. Those of you who should know will already know, thanks.
Meanwhile, and I don’t like to do this, but I may have to adopt a registration system for comments in the future. Its stupid I know.
EDIT: And I just got a call from MK who’s now sick! She has a fever and a stuffy head plus a headache. So that means she won’t be coming into the city for movie night. And tonight is the night when Jeff plays the absolutely brilliant Selfology (a.k.a. the Return of Jose Chung) episode from Millennium! Awww….
