Tuesday, October 02, 2018

And now a word from the administrator…

by Rick Blechta

I think it’s a wise idea to use my space this week to explain something to everyone here.

Lately, Type M has been experiencing an large upswing in spam comments. There are controls for limiting this kind of garbage but obviously the Evil Ones have found a way to get by the software keeping them at bay. As an example, Aline’s post yesterday had three spam comments (which were quite entertaining, by the way). I completely deleted two of them but left a partially deleted one as a warning — similar to putting a head on a pikestaff outside one’s castle gates — to those trying to sell their wares through our blog.

It’s somewhat of an onerous job to keep an eye on this, but I’m firmly committed to keeping Type M a spam-free place, mostly because spammers have ruined my personal website to the point that those in charge of the worldwide web have placed it on a black list of spamming sites. And I can’t tell you the hassles that has caused me over the years.

So for the foreseeable future, you may see in our comment section that posts have been removed by an administrator. That’s me, and I’ve removed a spam comment. I would never remove any legitimate comment from our blog unless it was exceptionally abusive — which is something that’s never happened. Nor do I foresee it happening. (Everyone here is so nice!)

I just want everyone to know what’s going on and why I’m doing what I’m doing.

I now return you to our regular blogging program…

And please keep commenting! We appreciate any and all comments — as long as you’re not spamming us.

—Rick

2 comments:

Aline Templeton said...

Thanks for patrolling all this, Rick.I've been having the same problem on my website and it's just an endless pain with extraordinary and stupid messages, often the same one posted under different names several times. I delete them constantly, so I can't think what the minds (there are minds?) behind the bots think they can hope to achieve. Does anyone know?

Charlotte Hinger said...

Sometimes I find myself wishing the internet had never been invented.