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 10th 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.
