It was bound to happen sooner or later. Today, I received a complaint that someone out there has been spamming one of the dotcomments installations on our server. “Oh, joy,” I thought. “Now what do I do?” As it turns out, I didn’t have to do much. The spammers were hitting the script, sure, but they were doing so in such a way that even someone with as poor of coding skills as I could block it fairly easily. I’ve now implemented the fix on all four appropriate comment systems.

Heaven help us, of course, if the spammers get more clever. It is remarkably non-trivial to excise individual comments from the files, and if that becomes a real problem I’m going to have to look at another comment system… thus abandoning all of the thousands of existing comments to date. May that day be a long one in coming, eh?