WordPress Spam

Within, no joke, 2 minutes of the christening of this brand new blog – which is not linked, as far as I know, anywhere on the internet – with a sparkly, bitter and tart first post, the opening spam salvo was launched across the bowels of the internet landing squarely on the poop deck. Then another within a few minutes. Around the fifth spam I rushed to the computer and rage unclicked the “email me when a new comment is received” option, cursing mightily and also ineffectually. I made a note to sort it out tomorrow.

Which day came and I awoke to 60 comments awaiting moderation, all of them total garbage, needless to say. Only two people know about this blog right now: me, and every goddamn spammer in the world. (Yeah, 60 is a small number, believe me, I know from the days of managing the DS email).

First step was to disable commenting for all but logged in users. Second step was to research some shit. So, really, we probably only want logged in users to be able to comment (so, two commentators, wow), but it’s the principle of the thing, so I looked at some WP best practices and checked out Akismet, which I signed up for like I need another online account somewhere. We’ll see how that works out.

Time spent: roughly 0.5h