It’s been a good run. Since I started this blog I’ve received 4408 comments. I value them highly and am glad for every single one of them. Sadly, there will not be a 4409th comment. I’m throwing in the towel. Spammers, you’ve succeeded. I’m finished, I quit, I give up. I’ve fought against you valiantly, I’ve done everything I know how and learned new things to try to keep up with you, but there’s one thing I simply can’t battle: your shear numbers.

Those of you that have been around a while know that I haven’t taken this quietly. I wrote a plugin a while back almost solely for the purpose of paging though the mountains of submitted comments to separate wheat from chaff. I’ve made a career out of keeping referral spammers from chewing up resources. I’ve swapped hosting providers 4 times after using up too many server resources fighting the fight. I finally find a hosting provider that appears to want to work with me and deal fairly with me, so I want to deal fairly with them.

The Proverbial Last Straw

Then this morning hits and I find my account suspended. “Oh joy, what is it this time?” After hearing the explanation (too many resources used, my comment script being the culprit) I figure my recent mod_security plugin was gumming up the works. I agree to remove the plugin and follow up on it, they reinstate the account. I do my part and off we go again. I decided to take a gander at the server logs to see what was going on. That was an eye-opener.

From roughly 6:00PM last night until 10:42AM this morning there were 9,938 posts to my comment script. That looks like a typo. Let me reiterate: there were nine thousand, nine hundred and thirty eight posts to my comment script. In less than 24 hours. At times there were 5 and 6 per second. Distributed IPs, of course. My mod_security rules caught them, they didn’t get through but the server was, simply, crushed under the weight. I just can’t keep up with that and I certainly can’t ask A Small Orange to keep up with it.

So, the comment script is gone, comments and trackbacks have been turned off for all posts. This will almost certainly remain the case for eternity. I’m considering adding a contact email address but we all know what happens to those.

Thanks to all my past commenters and I am truly sorry it came to this.

UPDATE: Please do note that there’s now a contact form available if you’re so inclined (thanks Ryan).

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