Under attack

The first thing you experience when you bring a weblog online, is that you are literally bombarded by what is known as « comment spam ». Most weblog packages allow readers to comment on posts. Comment spam consists in (automatically) posting dozens, if not hundreds of bogus comments for each article you post on your weblog.

The idea for the spammers seems to be to increase the number of links to whatever they are pushing (online-poker sites, viagra vendors, etc.), so that their « score » increases on search engines such as Google.

Not surprisingly, for WordPress, and I presume other weblog software, hacks and plug-ins have been developed to fight this onslaught. On the first day I brought sknoblog online and immediately came under attack, I rushed to implement one of these hacks which indeed brought an end to the spamming.

After a while however, the spam started coming back. Nothing as bad as on day one, but several a day. So I started looking into the plug-ins, installed a few, tweaked their features, but to no avail. It’s a losing battle anyway, as new spammers get to spam you before they can be filtered, after which they change guise and spam you some more.

As something of an old hippie-punk-whatever, I have a soft spot for people who try to mess with the tidiness of modern consumerist society, like the folks who deface the large advertising billboards in the Paris Metro with sharp, witty slogans against the evils of mass-marketing.

Unfortunately, the vast majority of Internet « pirates » are just even greedier, more ruthless and cynical bastards than the greedy, ruthless, cynical bastards who run our mind-numbing consumerist society to begin with, and who had already successfully turned the Internet into a giant, homogenized shopping mall.

So now, on your way to the mall, you get to be harassed by all these seedy peddlers of contraband and otherwise « naughty » merchandise.

So given that it’s a losing battle, that peaceful folks always lose to aggressive folks (which in a nutshell, is why an unregulated free-market, as spam so brilliantly demonstrates, is pure madness), I’ll probably be deactivating comments as an intermediate step on the road to the day I’ll have to sever my Internet and mobile phone connections or drown in spam.