As I post this, Leather Egg is under attack by comment spammers. I just checked my e-mail and was overwhelmed … 180 spam comments this morning. By the time I was finished deleting those, another 20 had been posted. (And while posting this entry, another 35 spam comments!) I will be disabling all comments in all posts ASAP and will then turn comments back on only for recent posts. Yeah, I know there haven’t been any “recent” posts. I expect to be sending some white smoke up the chimney soon, however. (I did manage to post another couple dozen photos in the Gallery over the weekend between web outages.)
UPDATE 2/21: When all was said and done this site was deluged with around 500 to 600 spam comments Wednesday in about a 6-hour timeframe. At one point after I had discovered the ongoing attack, they were coming it at an average of 7 to 8 spam comments per minute — they were literally coming in as fast as I could delete them. Through the trial-by-fire approach, I now know more than I’ll ever likely need to know about bulk editing in a SQL database. Fun times, eh? Comments are now disabled on all entries except those on the home page.
Now if I only had the 300+ uncategorized entries categorized … or the 150+ broken links fixed … or the high-res versions of the old photos in the gallery …
Hey you. How do those comment spammers work? Lately have noticed several a day, nowhere near your numbers, but was wondering how they do it.
Oh well.
BTW, Incredibly beautiful banner.
I find the Spam Karma plugin to be particularly effective in getting rid of unwanted spam comments. (see http://tinyurl.com/c3oru)