Keeping the seasonal theme, we are having a bit of a problem with unwanted gifts, specifically automated spam comments. For the last few days – and ongoing – there has been a particularly heavy flood of them. We usually get about 200 a day, but that has gone up to over 450 and increasing. Nearly all are caught by the automatic defences and the rest are quickly mopped up, but the problem is that they come in waves. When a flood is going on, you may find the site slow, or even temporarily unavailable.
I’ve also given up going through the caught spam to weed out any genuine comments wrongly flagged as spam. If anyone’s comment doesn’t appear when they submit it, or soon afterwards – I’m sorry but it has probably gone down with the spam.
Botnets. That’s where such automated floods come from. Can everyone running a Windows PC please get proper anti-virus/security software (there is good free stuff) and stop using Internet Explorer 6. Pretty please?