Tuesday, July 18, 2023

The New Verboten Word

I came home today after work and jumped online to check the blogosphere. I always check my spam comments folder because people get caught in there and I don’t want them to be stuck for days 🙂

Well, I had over 100 flipping spam comments all saying something along the lines of “This was a great movie, everyone should watch it” along with a link. I’ve had this going on for a couple of weeks, but never this bad.

When the russian spammers hit me, in cyrillic, I simply copy/pasted one of their letters and put that in my “goes straight to trash” rules for comments. However spammers work, once the programs realized the comments were going straight to trash without even the spam folder to check things, they dramatically decreased. To the point where I get 1 or 2 per week, instead of 10-20 every day. 2 years ago I did the same thing for the spanish spam bots. Just put in an upside down question mark and voila, they went straight to trash. And I haven’t been bothered by them for over a year now. So making spam comments go straight to the trash definitely stops them from mobbing my site.

Therefore, I am going to take some seriously drastic action, for about 2 months. I am going to make the word “movie” verboten in the comments here on Bookstooge.blog. Any comment with that word in it will go straight to the trash without me ever checking it. I realize this will cause chaos and confusion on my ever popular “movie review of the month” post, but I suspect you all have the intestinal fortitude to weather such vicissitudes. I also realize this will hit some bloggers much more than others and for that I apologize in advance. I just can’t think of any other way to deal with these forsaken movie link spammers.

I will re-examine things in September and make a decision about continuing this ban on the “M”-word then. I really hope that this drastic action will take care of things however.

Cheers!

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