Dr. Weevil: The Weblog Dr. Weevil: The Weblog

Powered by WordPress

Friday: December 30, 2005

More On Spam

Filed under: — site admin @ 12:42 PM GMT-0500

Yes, my title is a pun: think two words.

How long does it take to delete 501 spam comments (all of which arrived in the last 36 hours) in WordPress? Nineteen minutes, or, going by the way I actually measured it (my stopwatch has a dead battery), one Haydn Violin Concerto and a bit of another.

One reason it took so long is that four more spam comments arrived while I was deleting the first 501, one more while I deleted those four, and yet another in the 5-6 seconds it took to kill that one. I sometimes feel like I’m trapped in some kind of virtual zombie movie, shooting down one braindead parody of a human utterance after another, as further waves arrive spouting their sinister gibberish — usually in the form “[x] is a niceblogers [sic]”. Then again, sometimes I feel that I’m illustrating the blogular lemma to Zeno’s paradox: I can never blog about non-spam topics because first I have to kill all the spam accumulated since the last time I had a spam-killing orgy, then I have to kill all the spam accumulated during that time, and so on ad nauseam, if not quite ad infinitum.