The annoyance of comment spam
Those of you with weblogs offering comment features, please ban the 209.210.176.* range of IP addresses from posting comments. Seems that some Ukrainian porn spammer is using that IP range to spam his site on various weblogs; this guy has hit my site three times in the past week, and out of frustration, I’ve gone ahead and blocked the entire class-C IP from posting comments. Sorry to any legitimate posters who happen to have an IP address in that range, but judging from a Google search, it belongs to an ISP commonly used by spammers; besides, what else is the maintainer of a PG-rated weblog to do?
I didn’t mind it so much when the spammers were promoting sites that, while unethical, were still “safe for work”; I could delete the spams when I got around to them, and though I may not have agreed with the usurping of my blog’s comment pages for advertising purposes, I would have at least felt safe linking to the sites had they not been so unscrupulous. The latest batch of spam has gotten quite a bit racier, however, and it’s enough to make me wish there were an easily implemented, accessible solution to the problem of blog comment spam.
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