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.

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Heh, I was about to leave a flame saying it was certainly low to not even give that troll a warning since the first part of his comment seemed to almost have a place in an adjacent conversation. Then I gave the second half another attempt at a read and realized the guy was a patronizing asshole and deserved the horror that is "disemvowelling".

Hlp, 've bn dsmvwlld!

L33t tr0lls w1ll st1ll b3 4bl3 t0 p0st

I hope that you are able to send those vowels to one of the Eastern European nations where the need is so great.

By Chebachev (not verified) on 17 Jun 2005 #permalink

That joke, though old (and it's probably not even the first time it's been used in a discussion of disemvowelling), made me laugh.

Kudos.

Actually Chebachev, that just shows how charitable the Eastern European nations were, donating the vowels to those in need in Finland and Nigeria.

By Eli Rabett (not verified) on 23 Jun 2005 #permalink