Public Service Announcement: Anonymous comments turned off for a while

[mdlbear]

I have been getting a lot of comment spam on my last post. Like over 100, all in Chinese with random bits of latin text. Screening doesn't appear to have stopped them, so I'm turning off anonymous comments for a while. Meanwhile you can still comment using a registered account or OpenID.

Comments

[cellio]

I got a similar wave last week (200+ nonsense comments in Japanese). While looking for finer-grained options in settings I found that I could switch the captcha for anonymous comments from text to images. I hate image captchas personally because of my vision problems, but I switched to those anyway to see if it would make a difference, and the junk comments stopped. Just in case that's helpful to you...

[mdlbear]

I'll have to try that. And come to think of it the spam could have been Japanese -- I didn't look too carefully.

[spiffyvoxel]

From experience of WordPress and other blogging platforms, I am of the opinion that comment spam is the background radiation of the web - it’s everywhere, there’s no end of it, and it’s just noise.

[mdlbear]

Yeah; I had to install a spam-blocker on the WP blog that I manage ( https://goingsideways.blog/ ).

[acelightning73]

I've been getting something like that in YouTube comments. Someone will comment on my comment, telling me to contact them on a platform I have never heard of, for an "urgent message" about selling me some worthless stock. They will claim to be the person in the video - someone is claiming to be Willie Nelson, and wants my phone number so we can have a private conversation. (I've met him in person, and interviewed him three times for my country radio show in the 1970s He's too much of a gentleman to do something like troll YouTube for women to talk to.)