Since the boche.net blog began back in 2008, there have been many relevant and valuable comments left on blog articles here. Over time, I have implemented various plug-ins, security measures, as well as backup and recovery mechanisms to combat the growing amount of comment spam and hacking attempts on this blog.
Akismet Anti-Spam (a plug-in I have been using) recently announced that their free to use plug-in is moving towards a payware model. This change took effect in mid-August and my free use account was disabled. Fast forward to today and I found that I had nearly 700,000 comments (probably all spam – I only looked at the first 100) waiting to be approved. While these unmoderated comments didn’t make their way to polluting the blog, attempts to delete them did cause problems with the the blog and MySQL database resources on the server.
The good news is that after some unplanned time spent, I got it all cleaned up and the blog appears to be healthy and functional.
The bad news is that, for now, I’m waiving the white flag on combating spam. Until further notice, blog comments and discussions will effectively be disabled for pages as well as blog posts older than 14 days. If I find that is not effective enough, I will disable comments and discussions across the board. For any feedback, discussion, questions, etc. on any blog post, please reach out to me via Twitter or Email.
Thank you,
Jas
