When the Movable Type software that underlies this blog got upgraded a few months ago, I was hopeful that one of my most persistent and maddening problems — an unrelenting flood of comment spam — would finally be a thing of the past. Sadly, no. The sick bastards who create that shit must’ve had a uproarious laugh at my naivete. Their effluent started trickling back in within a few days of the upgrade. While my friends struggled to figure out how to navigate the new sign-in protocol, the bots were somehow slipping right past the hurdles and creating fully authenticated user identities for themselves, from which they could spew their annoying garbage with impunity. Yes, that’s right: several of my Loyal Readers still can’t leave a comment to save their own lives, but the spammers are able to set up pre-appoved accounts and publish their crap instantly, without even being held for moderation. And, just like it did before, the amount of spam I’ve been receiving has been inching up day by day. I’ve just spent several hours this evening manually clearing out a couple thousand phony comments accumulated over a mere two-day period.

It isn’t just the volume of spam that’s increased, either. The actual spam messages themselves have gotten larger, too; many of them are very, very long, essay-length strings of badly translated Engrish that appear to be masquerading as a some kind of epic folk tale but ultimately come down to a shill for knock-off designer shoes, or some damn thing. Sometimes the bots don’t even bother with the translation, and leave behind a big block of Chinese characters. At least I know where this shit is coming from, I suppose. But due to the way my back-end blog interface is constructed, I end up having to do a lot of scrolling to get past these huge tumorous things just so I can mark them for deletion. Sometimes I’m able to delete them in batches, which speeds things along, but just as often, the spammers publish a single message from each of a hundred identities, so I have to take them out one at a time.

Well, tonight I’ve reached the end of my rope. Again. The whole time I was wading through this stuff, removing it from my sight click by tedious click, I kept hearing a line from the classic Cold War movie WarGames: “After very careful consideration, sir, I’ve come to the conclusion that your new defense system sucks.” Indeed, sir, indeed.

I’m still hoping to find a solution to all this. A couple of helpful people have asked why I don’t install a Captcha module, one of those things that ask you to re-type the characters you see in a little box in order to prove your humanity; others have suggested I abandon Movable Type and migrate Simple Tricks to another blogging platform altogether. Unfortunately, neither of those options work for me, for various reasons. (The Captcha thing is especially frustrating. I know that system works well for those who have it, but for some ridiculous reason, Movable Type — at least the instance of it that I’m dealing with — isn’t set up to work with it.) So in the meantime, I’ve come to the unhappy decision to once again just shut down commenting altogether. As I’m sure I said the last time, I really hate to do this. The conversation with my friends and readers has been one of the great pleasures of having a blog. But I just can’t put up with this anymore. Lately, I’ve been spending more time dealing with spam than actually blogging.

I don’t know… maybe it doesn’t matter. There hasn’t been much conversation in a very long time anyhow. The last legitimate comment I received was over a month ago. And as much as I hate to say it, blogging itself seems to be on decline. Out of the little circle of non-professional bloggers I’ve enjoyed reading, only the indomitable Jaquandor still seems to be producing with gusto. Even my own habits have slacked off in recent months. I really hope I’m wrong, because blogs and blogging have been a pretty big deal to me over the past decade, but maybe it was just another passing fad whose time has come and is now rapidly going. Like I said, I just don’t know. And right now, it’s late and I’m tired and frustrated and more than a little depressed about all this, so I’m probably not thinking too clearly anyhow.

If anyone out there would like to talk to me about something I write here, I invite you to send a message to jason (at) jasonbennion.com. You can also find me on Facebook, where I post links to every entry that appears on this blog. I know these options are sub-optimal, but they’re the best I can offer at this time…