An open letter to my readers:

I love that you are here, and I love when you post comments to me, even when I disagree. But I hate blog comment spammers, who are using both comments and trackbacks to advertise their scam card-playing sites, on-line scam pharmacies, or porn websites. I mean, really…I work hard to keep the websites and mailing lists running, and the last thing I need is to manually delete literally hundreds of zombie-generated scam comments and trackbacks for these places. For the last few days, this blog (along with hundreds or thousands of others, I’m sure) has been rocked by these scam artists. (From yesterday afternoon to this afternoon, there have been almost FIVE HUNDRED AND FORTY attempts to post a comment or trackback to the blog promoting one or another of these scams, all from apparently-hijacked machines. A mildly sanitized version of the log from the last two days can be found here so you can, if you wish, see what I need to put up with.)

A while back, these slime forced me to mindly change the way the blog works, and place trackbacks into the approval queue instead of allowing them automatically (who the heck ever heard of approving trackbacks before these morons started attacking us?). It’s a d*mned shame, but at least it keeps me from having to do massive cleanup after one of these sleazeballs attacks the blog…the only one who is inconvenienced is me, gentle reader, and you never have to deal with it.

I have also added programming which parses (the computer “reads”) each comment entry…if it contains certain key phrases or in some cases even words, it is immediately rejected and dropped before entering the comment database. This saves me considerable time, because deleting hundreds of comments manually can take hours (and doing a mass-delete within MySQL runs the risk of deleting any legitimate comments which might have been entered during the attack, although any posted today are, I’m afraid, screwed, since I don’t have the time to go through the massive attack one trackback at a time…).

Problem is, because the slime gets cuter in their tactics, even though with the approval system for trackbacks they can not win, I find myself having to be more and more relaxed in what the system parses for to save me the work of having to remove them once they enter the database…and this runs the risk of having an innocent human get rejected with the same obscene comment I reserve for the scammers.

So if you received this comment while innocently mentioning, say, a certain card game with five or seven cards usually played for chips if not cold hard cash, please forgive me for the necessity of doing what I do to save myself, and you, from having to deal with the scum of the Internet. Please accept my sincere apologies, and try not to refer to certain male-enhancement drugs in a repost of your much-appreciated comments.

And if you want to see what the spammers get, and promise not to be shocked by seriously harsh language, please feel free to place in your comment the following:

iwannasee

…and you can see what the automated systems receive. (I can only hope there is a special place in hell reserved for slime who believe its a good idea to abuse someone else’s resources and time to advertise their probably-illegal wares…think about it, they steal computer time from the zombied machines to send trackbacks to a blog they don’t own, all in the hope of getting one sucker to give them a credit card number they can use to steal an identity. Boggles the mind, doesn’t it?)

Update July 17, 2005: The total phony trackbacks/comment posts for last week I needed to get rid of is 1,260. So far today (it’s around 12:30pm as I write this), I’ve had 124. And you wonder why those of us who run blogs seriously consider dropping comments/trackbacks completely?

Update July 17, 2005: By 11:54pm the number of attempts for today has hit 379. I renamed the trackback file yet again, which means the moron is getting 404 errors instead of getting anywhere near my anti-scum routines, but this brings up an interesting point I completely forgot about…since these morons are attaching directly to my trackback PHP file, and since I renamed it a while ago from the name usually given to that file in a standard install of Wordpress, that means these slime have programmed into their zombies information specific to this blog.

I expect them to catch onto the name change relatively quickly (hum…I should have the system email me immediately when the “new” name is POSTed to the first time), but it should be interesting to see how fast they can react to changes. It occured to me to write a painfully small shell script that renames the trackback PHP file, makes the corrections the required places through Wordpress, and handles the other required changes as well, allowing me to change the name of the trackback file literally moments from the time these slimeballs re-attach to the correct file. If, as I suspect, they really are programming specifically for this blog, it should be interesting to find out how much work they are willing to do to get around this…or whether they’ll have the sense to go find someone else to pick on, someone who doesn’t cost them so much time and energy, someone using the “usual” Wordpress plugins and not rewriting code on-the-fly. (Hum…I wonder what would happen if I changed the name automatically every time a trackback was entered?)