Here’s something worth sharing: I get a lot of comments on this blog. Well, not a lot really, but probably on the order of a hundred every week or so. All of them are spam. And they all have one really obvious thing in common: they’re all written in HTML. So they all start with <p>, which makes them really easy to identify. Now there’s something to put in my spam filter, whenever I get around to making a decent one.

EDIT: now silly me… it’s my comment posting/formatting code that adds in the <p>, not the spambots. So that tactic goes out the window. But I’m still pretty sure I’ve never actually gotten a legitimate comment. (If you know otherwise… leave a comment? ;-)

My little post about how much data weighs has been getting a lot of attention ever since I posted it in a Slashdot comment. Well, not really a lot of attention, but it’s gotten over 100 hits this month, which puts it up in the top 5 pages on the site. In the course of investigating where all this traffic is coming from, I noticed a lot of requests in the logs for /blog/addcomment. Now, perhaps a lot of those are spam, but I figured I’ve held off on anonymous commenting long enough. Since there’s no way I’ll be able to do it properly anytime soon, I put in a bit of a hack that lets people post comments without authentication. This probably means I’ll have to go through the comment table to weed out spam posts, but whatever, at least it should be interesting…