the horror! the horror! or: spam sucks

I haven’t even looked much at wackycow for a while. Today I decided that I was going to use it to keep track of some stuff that I would like to use both at work and at home (a list of short Howtos – inspired by Matt Cutts). Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed that each one of the posts on the front page had over 200 comments. Since I don’t have any illusions on the popularity of this website, I knew that I had a comment spam problem.

Now, wackycow has been running more or less continually since 2001, and I’ve never had a problem with comment spam before. However, it now seems like the nefarious underbelly of the interwebs has decided to target this last bastion of free commenting. Currently, comments are hidden while I setup a spam filter and remove the spam. Anonymous posting will now require approval before it’s posted. Not that anyone ever posts non-spam comments, but you know – someone may someday, and I have to be ready.

As an aside, the spam comments really got pretty nasty. Most of them relate to a topic that starts with s and ends with x (I’d like to buy a vowel, please).