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The past few days I had some technical problems, but my hosting service fixed them with speed and efficency. Thank ye!

My family has been hit by a very efficient virus. First my youngest daughter caught it, throwing up 16 times in one evening. Then my next daughter followed with 13 instances. Now my wife and I are feeling not-too-fine… So yet another reason for some mild blogging downsizing.

Also, I have been drowning in comment spamming the past week, getting almost 100 boring “Cool Site. Thanks” comments a day. Reading a reminder on Douglas Karr’s blog on the plug-in Bad Behaviour, I realized that I had installed, but not activated the plug-in. That has been rectified now. A look at the statistics, though, revealed that Doug had much more success with it than me. I still get about 90 spam comments a day, and over the past few days, Bad Behaviour blocked 12 attempts.

Enter Spam Karma to the rescue. A plugin that analizes each comment, and blocks those that are suspect. Easy configuration, excellent results! It let through the one comment that was made by a human, and blocked the 100s that weren’t.

I don’t really understand spammers - what do they expect when they flood blogs with comments? Do they seriously think that people will just stand by?

What you can do

If you have your own blog, I advise you to install the two above mentioned plug-ins, and delete all previous comments that are spam.

As a reader, a) never, ever follow a spam-comment link b) inform the owner of the blog that s/he has been spammed and that there are free plug-ins available.

I also installed a few other plug-ins. If you get a 404 error, you will also be presented with a site-map of my blog. Also, you can happily donate 99 cents to me - just click the button on the bottom of the menu bar on the right. Now you can also see my 10 most popular entries.