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Thursday: December 29, 2005

Drowning In Spam

Filed under: — site admin @ 11:51 PM GMT-0500

One reason for my paucity of posts:

For the last few months, I have been getting around 100 spam comments per day on this site, plus about half that on my other site for Latinists. That was annoying enough, since WordPress forces me to check a box for each individual comment before it can be deleted. The box is very small, so it takes some concentration, though I can listen to music while I delete.

A few weeks ago I noticed that spam comments were up to 200 per day. For instance, between Friday morning and Monday evening, while I was out of town, this site received 720 comments, of which 718 were spam and 2 were from some jerk who called me a “COMMIE” and a “COWARD” (his caps, of course) for having moderated comments and for not approving his first idiotic and irrelevant comment in the two minutes before he sent the second one.

In the last 24 hours, I have received 386 spam comments for this site, plus 66 for the other one, so it appears that the quantity has more or less doubled just in the last week. If spam comments continue their exponential increase I will soon be forced to turn off comments entirely or spend every waking hour deleting them. Can WordPress provide some method of deleting all comments? It would be easy enough to skim through even several hundred, individually approve those few that are genuine, and then press ‘delete all’ for the rest. Is there anything else (not too technically challenging) I can do? Is anyone else getting an increasing flood of spam?