Guillotine

So it appears I’m having a possible issue with spam in the comments, and just wanted to give readers a heads up. Not that I get a lot of comments as it is, but it seems lately I’ve been getting a ton of comments on 3 different articles all in Russian. As a result I’ve set the comments to require an email to leave a comment, and I now moderate all comments before they post on the blog. This seems to have had little effect as I’m still getting about 20 emails to moderate posts written in Russian every day, but at least this way they are not cluttering up the site.

Now I can’t say for sure that they are spam per se… I’ve translated most of them, and they appear to be answering each other’s posts and I am reading actual hits from the ip addresses in my stats, so there may be actual people typing, but the main issue is that the messages though coherent when translated are all completely unrelated to the article or even the site. Therefore I have decided to delete posts in Russian without even batting an eye because regardless of whether they are spam or not the comment pages are not a chatroom for off topic discussions.  I’m also blacklisting those ips simply because I’m tired of seeing the emails and having to delete the messages every day.