1 Told you it was good. ;-)

2 Papa Pixy, I'm afraid The Pond has been slammed with spam over the past 12 hours or so, all of it u*g-related.  Not as interesting as yours though... I rather like the one that copies a random comment.

Can we just completely ban the word "ugg"?

3 I've raised the ugg-ding level from 2 to 5.  That means that a single mention of the word by an unregistered commenter will get the comment flagged as probable spam, two will reject the comment, and three will automatically ban that IP.

Let's see how that goes.

4 In the middle of this spamuggattack, something... odd... has occurred to my comments.  The retrospective comment sidebar has taken to showing comments from June, and if I go into the editor and look at my comments, things are all argbargly.

You're welcome to pop in and take a look, to see what I mean.

5 That shouldn't happen, but I do have a program that fixes it up.  I'll run that now.

6 Test test pokety poke...

7 Looks like it's all fixed, Pixy.  Thank you so much!!!

8

The most recent spammer, that you just got hit by (Tiffany Jewelry) also spammed me. Which is interesting, because I require registration to make comments.

I've added that guy to my ban list. Also, my "recent comments" is all fouled up now.

9 Actually, I haven't, because I can't figure out how.

10 Brickmuppet got hit with that one, too.

11 I wonder if it's time to automatically triple the value of "black words" which appear in the commenter's name?

12 Even more to the point, triple the value of "black words" if they appear in a URL.

13 Yeah, that's a good idea.  I'm making some improvements to the spam filter today.

14

Pixy, I can't ban this guy because I can't figure out what to add to the ban list. (He just left three on Chizumatic.) He's logging in, and of course to register had had to have a site here. But once he's logged in, he isn't using either his site or his login name when he posts his crap.

So I can't figure out what to add to the ban list to get rid of him.

In my "comments" listing, I see the posting date, the text he posted, and I see the name he used in the comment, and the URL he used, and whatever email address he entered. But I don't see his real meenu identity and I don't know of any way for me to find it out. The "comments" listing needs another column which contains the login ID of the user, if any.

15 I was thinking about this more. There isn't any room for a new column in that listing. What about a way to click a link on a particular comment and bring up an extended listing of just that one with more information, such as the true login of the commenter (if any)?

16 This guy just doesn't give up, does he? I wonder if we can bribe him to go hassle someone else.

17 I read an article on the economics of spam recently.  It's big business - multiple billions of dollars a year.

18 Economics may be unfortunate, but we still need to ban by login.

19

We can do that now. Problem is, there isn't any way to figure out what login to ban.

I got spammed again yesterday morning. I happened to notice it while it was happening, and deleted the spams within minutes. But I couldn't ban the spammer because I don't know what login they used.

20 Yep, I'm setting up a quick-and-easy banning function right now.  Ban URLs, IPs and users in one click.  Well, three clicks.