Lots of folks here in the mee.nu/mu.nu empire have been getting plagued with spammers recently. Brickmuppet, and even Pixy hisself. And even the Duck got hit just now.

Not me. In the two and a half years I've had this blog on mee.nu, I haven't had a single spam comment.

Why? Because I require commenters to register and log in. That's too sophisticated for a spambot, and most of the morons running the bots don't check to see if they succeed or fail on every site they hammer. So while I'm sure that the bots have been trying to leave comments here, they've been receiving error messages telling them that they have to log in. And spambots don't have the kind of AI it would take to recover from that.

And that's why there aren't any entries on my recent-comment list trying to tell us about shoes or clothing, like this:

I occasionally receive an email from someone complaining that they want to comment and don't want to register, and I sympathize. Or they don't understand why they have to get a website here at mee.nu just in order to comment.

Well, it's kind of like Live Journal. Membership is all or nothing. I had to create an account with Live Journal in order to leave comments on a couple of blogs there (e.g. Pete when he did his anime blogging there) and part of what came with that was a Live Journal home page. But I never used it. And people who register here don't have to use their mee.nu home pages that get set up.

I am not going to be changing this policy, because it serves me well. And as for certain people who just mail their comments to me instead of posting them, I really wish you'd register, log in, and post for yourself.

I'm going to be blunt about this: I do it this way for my convenience, not for yours. But that's because it's only just a little bit inconvenient for you, whereas if I went back to open commenting it would be painfully inconvenient for me.

UPDATE: Pete responds but misunderstands. There have been people who have written to me to say, "I have a comment but I don't want to register. Would you post the comment for me?"

I like email, when it's personal and private. I don't like it when it's make-work.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Site Stuff at 06:07 PM | Comments (9) | Add Comment
Post contains 404 words, total size 2 kb.

1 I originally broke down and registered just to comment.  I still have dreams of actually doing something with my site someday, when I have time... somehow, I don't think Pixy's going to be needing new HDs for me anytime soon.

Posted by: BigD at September 30, 2009 07:11 PM (LjWr8)

2 Speaking solely for myself, I've had a total of five spam comments in the past six months.  When you're not a big-name blogger, it seems that The Evil Ones don't bother too much with you.

But because I've had so few spams, and because I know that a few of my commenters (Official First Reader Mallory, for example) would probably end up barred from leaving comments-- her computer is very old and very very slow-- it just works better if I don't have registration.

Though, to be honest, if I was being plagued by spambots I'd enable registration in a heartbeat.

Posted by: Wonderduck at September 30, 2009 08:22 PM (/O6qY)

3 I don't think I had ever even commented when you set it up where you had to register in order to.  I still did it in case I ever did want to comment.

Posted by: Arson55 at September 30, 2009 08:33 PM (rAY/z)

4 I'd sure rather register than have to fill out a Turing word box every damn time I comment.

Posted by: Toren at September 30, 2009 09:10 PM (9K6fX)

5 Time for spam filter 2.0 - and to ban China.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at September 30, 2009 09:11 PM (PiXy!)

6

There were times back in the old days when I seriously considered banning both China and Russia.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at September 30, 2009 09:26 PM (+rSRq)

7 Add Ukraine, Moldova, Latvia, and Netherlands to the list.  Those four, along with Russia, account for 98% of my spam on a board I admin.

And you don't want to know how much Houblog gets.  Trust me, I am closing in on 100,000 caught by Akismet in only three years.

Posted by: ubu at October 01, 2009 04:13 AM (kL7KW)

8 It looks like someone's written some code specifically to spam Minx.  All the spam on the mu.nu side is hitting via the new comments thingy - an early version of Minx, with the same spam blocking tricks, whereas before it mostly came via the standard Movable Type comments form.

Now that I know that, I can mess them up good.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at October 01, 2009 04:52 AM (PiXy!)

9 This post has inspired me to register, and maybe start leaving comments.

Posted by: MeganeNeko at October 01, 2009 03:58 PM (IAtUE)

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