A collection of doodles with a bit of commentary by RICK GREEN - your cartooning friend

Friday, March 5, 2010

An Evil Dust Bunny Has Hit

I woke up yes- terday morning to find that there were 444 new com- ments on my blog!  "Wow!," I thought, "somebody out there really likes my work."  It didn't take long to find out that my blog had been "spammed."  Of course I don't know who the evil dust bunny is. All I know is that the culprit is Asian because the "comments" involved a loooong like list of links in some kind of Asian script.  It turned out that he/she left one of their annoying spam comments on EVERY SINGLE ONE OF MY POST!!  Grrr.....!!!  I am guessing that they have some kind of program which seeks and finds blogs to target and then will automatically place the links there.

What likely took them seconds to do is taking me days to erase.  I have been slowly going through each of my post and permanently deleting the links.  I'm a little over half way through.

To delete one of the comments involves seven clicks with scrolls on my computer.  Do the math.  To rid my blog of this "dust" I have to click 3,108 times.  That doesn't include the "miss-clicks" and the times I click on the post again by mistake.  So now I've had to change my setting to give approval to a comment before it will be seen on my blog.  I don't like that.  When I visit a blog I just like seeing that my comment in place before I move on.

Any of you have your blog attack in the same way?  What steps did you take to prevent it?  I did follow the link on his name back to his "blog" and told him that he was a pain in the butt.  That probably didn't help me any.  Also, I reported it to Blogger.  Who knows if they'll do anything.

At least going back through each one of my post has been a trip down memory lane for me.  So many doodles, so many kind people making nice comments.  I've been at this blog thing for over three years now.  I guess I will keep on going—despite the evil dust bunnies that are lurking out there.

Copy & Share If You Dare

11 comments:

flask said...

it is for this reason -and this reason only- that i went to moderated comments on my blog.

i found that removing spam leaves a "this comment removed by a blog administrator" note, but rejecting spam only takes a second and leaves no trace.

if you don't like my work, fine. you get to leave your comment. but if you spam me, i just can't tolerate that.

so good luck cleaning all that up, and i understand about the moderation.

Shelley said...

I've had this happen. I went to comment moderation. Also, if you go to the spammers blog and go to the top of the page, you can click on the button that says to flag this blog, and then you can report them as spam. Eventually they get taken down by blogger. Good luck!

Rick said...

To Shelley: THANK YOU Shelley. I didn't know I could handle it that way. I went and did just that.

Alice said...

hi rick, yes, i had this happen about a year ago. i had to go physically delete the comments from every post i'd made - something like 200+ posts. what a pain! as you well know. i set my comments up to be approved before posting - like you have. i haven't had any more problems. sometimes it seems like i should have more comments than i do, but at least no more crazy ones. good luck!

Laura ~Peach~ said...

went through the same and had to enable the verication that i hate as well... hugs and happy cleaning

Margaret (Peggy or Peg too) said...

LOVE YOUR HEADER!!

I haven't had dust bunnies as bad as yours thankfully. I am getting constant Anonymous comments with garbly goop. Or the ever lovely financial advice or the ever popular penis enlargment.

So I will try some of these suggestions that others have shared - thank you.

Flea said...

I recently had someone spam my blog, not my comments. I can't find them. Eighty what seems like comments, but they're not.

Rick said...

To Flea: That sounds very strange. My sister said that my blog slowed down her computer until I deleted all the comments. I can't explain that either. It took me three days to finally make it through at 444 of them. Grrrr...

Christy said...

Awesome new header!!!!!!!! Love it!

vjc said...

Ah - that explains the random email I got from your blog. I thought it strange that you'd been doodling in Chinese! But moderation doesn't bother me (unless my husband is trying to recommend it as a lifestyle) so understand completely.

Had the same "grr" reaction when I got a scam request through my gallery. But then I thought "Someone's trying to scam me? Man, I just hit the big times!!"

suzanne cabrera said...

Love your dust bunny....but I'm sorry for the reason of it's appearance! What a headache!!!!!!!