Spambots and trolls

One of the drawbacks of switching to a more popular blogging platform is more spam. Spambots just did not know how to comment on the old blog -- I got two just spams this year. In the last 24 hours spambots have tried to post about 100 comments. The spam filters stopped all of them, which is good, but they also sometimes catchlegitimate comments. I fish those out, but it's still a pain for everyone concerned. If your comment gets caught please be patient and blame the vile parasites that run spambots.

I've also changed the technique I'll be using against trolls. Posts by trolls will be disemvowelled. Just to be clear, since some people abuse the term, a troll is not someone who disagrees with me, but someone who tries to disrupt discussion by posting abuse or specious arguments. Trolls aren't interested in learning anything, but get their kicks from the attention they get. The best thing to do with trolls is to ignore them, but if they are good at their little game it can be hard to do. So I'll help by removing all the vowels from their comments.

If you see a disemvowelled comment, just ignore it. You can still read it if you try hard enough, but trust me, it's not worth the effort. If your comment gets disemvowelled, go away. If you were genuinely trying to make a point, then you need to reconsider the way you expressed yourself.