Site note: new anti-spam measures
As the more astute readers may have noticed, I’ve increasingly been having spam problems on this site. More and more garbage comments and pingbacks were getting through my spam filter, Spam Karma. Unfortunately, the sole developer of that WordPress plugin stopped working on it more than a year ago, while the spammers haven’t stopped improving their techniques. So I’m switching over to Akismet, WordPress’s own anti-spam plugin, which is still actively supported. I’ll report on how well it’s doing after I’ve seen it in use for a couple weeks, but after one day of usage, I can at least guarantee that it doesn’t totally suck, as it’s stopped dozens of spam comments without letting a single one through.
Those of you who aren’t bloggers, consider yourselves lucky that you don’t have to deal with the messy issue of blog spam. I’ve found it to be a lot worse than tackling email spam. For starters, I get a lot more of it, and I also have to deal with it, as any spam that gets through makes your site look really trashy and could potentially damage your search engine rankings (Google punishes sites that link to spammy havens of the Internet). When you get a spam email, you can just ignore it and nothing bad happens; when you get a spam comment on your blog, you have to delete it, and that’s a fair bit more effort.
In my time off from fighting against spam, I amuse myself by thinking of all sorts of creative punishments for blog spammers. For instance, I’m a fan of Medieval-style hanging, drawing, and quartering, but that doesn’t quite satisfy me. I’d prefer hanged, drawn, and fractally quartered. Cut into four pieces, then cut each remaining piece into four pieces, ad infinitum …
That’s an appropriate punishment for spammers, and it satisfies my fascination with mathematics to boot.
