The Turning Gate

When it spams, it pours

MAN: You sit here, dear.

WIFE: All right.

MAN: Morning!

WAITRESS: Morning!

MAN: Well, what've you got?

WAITRESS: Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam; spam bacon sausage and spam; spam egg spam spam bacon and spam; spam sausage spam spam bacon spam tomato and spam;

VIKINGS: Spam spam spam spam...

WAITRESS: ...spam spam spam egg and spam; spam spam spam spam spam spam baked beans spam spam spam...

VIKINGS: Spam! Lovely spam! Lovely spam!

WAITRESS: ...or Lobster Thermidor a Crevette with a mornay sauce served in a provencale manner with shallots and aubergines garnished with truffle pate, brandy and with a fried egg on top and spam.

WIFE: Have you got anything without spam?

WAITRESS: Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.

WIFE: I don't want ANY spam!

And neither do I. Textpattern's system of requiring a comment preview before submission is usually prevention enough, and I've never had problems with spam in the past. Beginning a few days ago, however, I've had the shit spammed out of me. My anti-spam plugins have been good about flagging the spam for moderation, and so you haven't had to see it. But my inbox has been flooded with comment notifications, and I've lost a lot of time this week moderating spam, banning IPs and deleting junk comments from my database. What's a TXP user to do?

What I really want is something that will block the spam before it ever makes it into the database, but I've not found any plugins for that. They all seem to moderate spam rather than prevent it. Hell.

If you're reading this, then I presume you're a legitimate visitor and not a bot. If you've posted a comment to which I haven't responded, it might have been caught up in the deluge of spam and inadvertently deleted. I'm trying to be careful, but in receiving over 200 spam comments a day, I'm bound to miss a few legitimate posts. Hit me from the contact form if you suspect I've overlooked you.

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