Sigh.

[captainsblog]

I'm just about at the end of the line here with spam commenters.  They're up to close to a dozen a day, each one emailing me separately through the LJNotify service. So far, I've been a good Internet citizen and gone back to the original entry, opened it (I'm the only one who ever sees them, because the LJ spam filters are pretty good and they all get hidden as "suspicious") and deleted it/reported it as spam. An hour later, a new one, the same crap, usually a different IP address (but, just as often, the same one; do Boris and Natasha even blacklist the IPs we report?). Frustrate, rinse, repeat.

I had a massive problem with this on my Mets blog, which, because it's linked to by a few Google heavy hitters, is even bigger bait for page-rank puffing. I tried putting CAPTCHAs on all comments there. The spammers laughed and slapped their 10-cent-an-hour CAPTCHA solvers to work harder.  Finally, I had to shut down comments on it altogether, because that journal doesn't have a useful Friendslist mechanism.

But this one does. And so, unless Russian Mafia Central cleans up the problem, I will be making commenting here friends-only. If you really have something to say? 

-Friend me, duh. Always looking for new and fresh.

-See if the post has been crossposted to Facebook. Many of them are, as are all of the Met blog posts (in the Met Bloggers group, oddly enough).

-And if all else fails, almost every entry I post here began its life on Dreamwidth and got cross-posted to LJ. Including this one. At the end of the cross-posted entry, there's always a link back to the Dreamwidth original. There's never been a spam problem there, and I will get and cross-post the comments over to here. Inconvenient, but less trouble than dealing with all this ugg soldes get a cash loan with bad credit drugstore and

Для чего нужен safe диска, а точнее образ системного диск

crap I get every day now.

I'm almost afraid to ask what that last one says.

Comments

[bill_sheehan.livejournal.com]

You're just popular, Cap'n!

Once you're targeted, it's over. These turkeys share information. I've had the devil's own time with them in my professional capacity. Comments just can't be left open anymore.

Well, mine are, but not that many people read my twaddle. Security by obscurity, that's my motto.

[digitalemur.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I locked down to friends only, years ago.

An acquaintance from college complained to me a few months later that it was an incredible pain that I had blocked people who weren't account holders from posting.

I said if she had a solution for the spam comments, she was welcome to share, otherwise she was welcome to _get an LJ account_.

Said acquaintance has entitlement issues anyway. I didn't feel very bad.

[captainsblog.livejournal.com]

Awww, when I saw you commenting, I thought I might get a translation on that.

::waits for Darina to come round::

[glenmarshall.livejournal.com]

Cross-posted to FB? Hmmm... Send me a friend request at http://www.facebook.com/glen.marshall

[liddle-oldman.livejournal.com]

There's a lot about this future that confuses me.

[tilia-tomentosa.livejournal.com]

LOL that's in Russian, but I can't make sense of the grammar (or the some of the key words for that matter). Are you sure you've copied the whole of the last word? It think it's something about a copy of a system disk, but I'm not sure. The sentence starts with asking what whatever-that-is is for. Maybe the rest of the ad explains (or at least tries to explain) its usage. :D

Did you get spam from registered LJ users, or was it just the anonymous spammers?

[captainsblog.livejournal.com]

Mostly anonymous, but I got a spam account holder glommed onto me the last few days, leaving wonderful indecipherable messages.

So they're all blocked now.

[tilia-tomentosa.livejournal.com]

There was a time when Russian spam bot accounts were "all the rage". They would just friend people, and one of the real Russians on LJ taught me how to identify them if they weren't blatantly obvious. I even managed to get a few such accounts deleted by the LJ staff. Maybe you remember that time too?

But that was nothing compared to the current stream of anonymous spam (some of which is in languages I can't even identify or atrociously bad English) that forced me to disable anonymous comments.