Until recently I had taken this blog offline. Aside from my being incredibly busy with Melissa, the day job, and minor problems with blog mail notifications, the single greatest reason I haven't been blogging was the onslaught of spam.
Initially I had set up the site so that comments would be posted without my reviewing them. I received the occasional spam comment offering male performance enhancement, videos of things I didn't want to imagine, and of course, mortgage refinancing for born-again, lesbian gamblers. While annoying, the volume of these types of comments was manageable for a while, about five or six per entry.
Around September 2004 I started receiving a higher volume of spam comments and had no choice but to change permissions on comments on the site, as noted in Blog Comments Now Require Approval. That worked out okay until March 2006, when my posting of Tour of the New Apartment coincided with some new advances in automated blog comment spamming technology. In the course of a few days following that post, the blog was deluged with spam comments. I was pretty busy at the time and was able to log onto the site for a few days. Then, when I finally had a spare moment, I logged on to discover over 9000 spam comments were awaiting my review. That was more than I could handle. I updated the site to shut down all commenting and, shortly thereafter, decided to halt all blogging entirely. The maintenance was just too much work.
Now I've decided to bring the blog back online and I still have a backlog of 3600 spam comments waiting for me to review. I'm slowly chipping away at that pile, adding them to my list of banned IP addresses with the hope that it will slow down the spammers once I bring comments back online. Until I clear that backlog, I'll be keeping comments turned off for all entries on the site. I'll be working with my buddy John, who's servers host this blog, to implement some automated spam control on his end. We'll also be upgrading to the latest version of Movable Type, which has some new whiz-bang spam management features. I'll keep you posted on our progress.
In the meantime, if you want to send me a comment that you'd like posted about the blog, send me e-mail and, assuming it meets the criteria for an appropriate comment, I'll post it.
