Spammers. Proof that everything created for good can be used for evil.
While our little blog sees a couple hundred visitors on an average day, we receive thousands of comments. Most relate to designer shoes, handbags, fake designer sunglasses, and other junk in several different languages. And of course porn. Most originate from the foreign countries (many IP addresses from China). Oddly, most are targeted at one particular post from last year. Recently, the number of these comments has been ratcheting up to the point that the server can’t handle the load. Performance has frequently been slow. 95% of recent traffic to the server was comment spam bots. We’ve tried many things to stop this traffic. We’ve modified the firewall configuration and blocked IP addresses. We have added a little captcha confirmation to the comment submission process in the hope that only a real person can submit a comment. We’ve even deleted the target post. (I don’t think anyone will miss it.)
Hopefully we have resolved the problem for now and we can get back to post our usual exciting and informative content.
