I’ve taken a few nuclear measures to get rid of some of the comment spam.

I’ve removed the links from author names in comments. So now the email addresses you post on comments just get sent to me (in case I need to check something about a comment) and appear nowhere on the site.

More importantly, I’ve banned all links to .com sites within comments. Links to .edu, .net and .org sites should still work fine. If you want to inform someone about a .com link, you’ll have to spell out the address because any live link will be automatically banned.

It’s sad to have to do this, but given the alternatives were (a) spending hours a week on cleaning up spam or (b) letting the blog be used for people advertising everything from illegal gambling sites to rape porn, I think these measures seem quite reasonable.

UPDATE: Well 24 hours later no spam has gotten through the new net. On the other hand, nor have any legitimate comments. So it’s hard to tell how well this is working.

SECOND UPDATE: OK – it seems to be working tolerably well. If you’re the person using a server at Emory (IP address 170.140.188.96) to try and send banned messages to the blog, then let me know that you’re doing something legitimate. But from where I sit it looks like you’re trying to send out spam from a university server, and that’s a very very bad idea.