Gargh! You know, I've never really hated an entire profession before. The traditional whipping boys (and girls) depicted in American popular culture—telemarketers, lawyers, politicians, journalists (am I forgetting anyone?)—they've never really gotten under my skin the way they do with some people.
But spammers? Fuhgeddaboudit.
Has anyone ever met a spammer? Probably not, because they probably refer to it euphemistically as "Internet marketing" or some such. Because if they were to tell you, straight up, "What do I do for a living? Oh, I'm a spammer," they'd probably be gettin' their clocks cleaned six ways from Sunday.
I tell you, I'd love to see the whole lot of spammers run up the cattle ramp, hit with the stun gun, and then run through the slaughterhouse like so much hamburger.
Anyway, these assholes have forced me to switch the way A Hamburger Today handles comments. In short, I've switched to the HaloScan commenting package, which I've always sorta liked anyway after seeing it in action on this guy's blog.
The long of it, for other blogdorks reading this (non-blogdorks can stop reading now), is that, for a while there—a couple days—I had to turn off commenting completely. The software I use to run this site (and its sister site, Slice) was geting overrun with numerous comment spam attempts. While they rarely got through and onto the blog, they caused a strain on my hosting server. At that point, I started getting warning e-mails from the hosting service, Dreamhost. The undue strain on the commenting CGI script was taking me way over my allotted CPU minutes, at which point Dreamhost disabled all my back-end junk that allows me to publish.
Anyway, I see HaloScan as a sort of compromise. While I'd love to continue using the built-in Movable Type commenting, there seems to be no way I can do so without running afoul of my hosting service. And anyone who knows what I'm talking about can hold your comments about using the built-in antispam junk available in MT 3.2. That stuff seems to work fine for stopping comments from posting to the blog, but it doesn't mean that spammers can't try to post. And that's where the problem for me lies—just with the fact that they can trigger the comment script to run.
So that's that. From now on, comments will appear in the little pop-up window for each post. I don't like that they won't appear automatically as part of an individual entry's page, but I guess that's the bargain I've gotta strike.
Now ... I've concocted a recipe for comment spammers:
COMMENT SPAMBURGERS
Makes 4 This recipe is not fit for human consumption; it should only be prepared and served to spammers.
Ingredients
1/4 pound USDA canner-grade beef, preferably infected with mad cow
3/4 pound soy filler
2 heaping teaspoons rat droppings
1 cup finely ground glass
4 oversized stale buns, preferably moldy
4 loogies, freshly hocked
1. Wearing hazmat gloves, mix beef, filler, and droppings in a bowl. Add glass, and, for safety, make sure to stir with a spoon at this point. 2. Using dirty gardening gloves, form meat mixture into 4 evenly sized patties. 3. Place raw patties on bun bottoms, garnish with 1 loogie each, and top with bun tops. 4. Serve cold.
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