I believe we are under attack

I suspect Scienceblogs.com is under attack. Why? Because the site is going really really slow, and the spam coming in is different ... huge spamy comments with a zillion links which I think send the server into conniptions. I've closed comments on all posts over five days in age on this blog, for the time being. Sorry for the inconvenience.

More like this

You may have noticed that I've been entirely silent about the movie Expelled. This is because of something that I do: Utterly ignore certain aspects of reality because my level of interest does not exceed my level of annoyance. I also ignore entire chunks of reality because I find them too…
A couple of technical notes that may affect your reading and commenting experience: 1) The site developer has tweaked the RSS feeds to include links to the full post, and to the comments section. The comments links on some posts even appear to give a comment tally, which is pretty cool. Of course…
Blogs and schools often don't mix. Many blogs are free ranging entities untethered to an institutional or editorial framework. In public discussions of Scienceblogs.com, the fact that every blogger is editorially independent of each other and of the hosting organization, Seed Media Group, is…
So I've been offline a lot the last few weeks - as you know we had 10 kids in our house for a couple of days the week before Thanksgiving, and I was out of town until yesterday. While a few posts have gone up, I've spent absolutely no time on anything other than absolute necessities online. So…

Perhaps our Respectfully Insolent friend has riled up a nest of bad guys.

By Nick Theodorakis (not verified) on 01 Sep 2013 #permalink

If you are being attacked it means you are hurting them. Good job.

By Richard Chapman (not verified) on 01 Sep 2013 #permalink

I once gave up having a comments section because it would get full of meaningless links. I tracked a few down to see it was some kind of way to up the sites ratings on google. It was not. Two measures that might help. Filter out links. People can still give them without the .com if they are meaningful. The other is one of those weird letter anti-bot scripts.

I have been getting "Service Not Available" messages for several blogs, the first time I try to view posts. I need to refresh several times in order to see things - I assume this is the result of all the crap coming in?