Those Spammers

I have had to change my commenting facility on this blog. I have gone back to Registered Users and Open ID only. I apologise to all those genuine commenters who may be affected by this but I’m afraid the spammers have finally got to me.

I’m not obsessive about stats but I do occasionally look at my blog statistics. Usually there are five or six people on the blog at any one time. I don’t know who, of course, just the number of visitors. But every now and then there is a massive spike in the number of visits. I've shown an example below when some time late on 10^th July my blog received 134 visits in the space of about half an hour.

This is not a cause for rejoicing, leaping around or patting myself on the back because I run such a successful blog. It is a sign that spammers have visited and I am about to be bombarded by spam comments.

Spam comments are illogical. Quite often they are no more than a string of disconnected words. I know that they don’t read this blog but if any of them do, can I point out that I refuse to allow myself to read what they say. I look at enough to establish that this is spam and then I delete it. I never visit their website and I would never, ever click on any of the links that they might include in the comment. In other words, Spammer, “You are wasting your time!”

It’s a shame that people trawl the Internet in this way. It’s an annoyance that they have affected my blog to such an extent that I have to change my security settings. I’m sure that most of my spammers are harmless enough. I wouldn’t know because, like I say, I’ve never visited, but there are, as we know, harmful people lurking, and that’s the biggest shame of all.