My website is a very attractive target to ‘comment spammers.’ These people run armies of computers, looking to sneak a link to their sites on my site.
The idea is, Google judges you by the links you get. If these, mostly porn and drug vendors, can get their address on my site, their position on Google will move up.
Most of these comment spammers are pushing the most vile of websites – bestiality, child porn – very scary and sickening stuff. I know. I see the comments that pass through the blocks I’ve erected. And, from time-to-time, some of these might briefly make it to a comment page.
It’s really awful. I always pause when I see these things, because it means these subjects are being searched for on Google and other engines! There’s obviously a market for this crap.
Anyway, because of the software I’m using, when these comments come in (and they come in waves) my site can get overwhelmed. I’m only allowed so many connections to the database that drives the site.
This happened again this afternoon. Though none of today’s spammers made it through my defenses, they totally slowed the system and gummed up everything about it. I couldn’t even log on to reconfigure or post a note explaining what was happening.
I plan on upgrading to a newer version of this software which is better at preserving resources. I’ll also be moving to another provider.
I’d do it today, but I have to make sure all 1,650+ pages of content (and the secondary and tertiary pages associated with them) end up with exactly the same URL. Not easy.
One of the Internet’s most difficult problems is, it is so easy to automate nuisance crimes, like these spammers. It takes them seconds to cause me hours of work.