I have just spent several hours going through all the web log entries and comments and have deleted all the comment spam that I found. In case anyone’s interested, about 15% of the comments (70 or so) were spam.

(For those unaware of what comment spam is, it is a comment that advertises something and doesn’t add anything useful to the discussion. Usually the “product” being advertised is porn, drugs, or other unsavory items that wouldn’t be of even the slightest interest to any of this log’s regular readership.)

Our spam policy is a strict no-tolerance policy. Anyone who posts comment spam will have their IP (network) address banned permanently. Period, end of story, no negotiations. As of today, I have banned 22 IP addresses.

If any of our regular readers find that they can no longer post (which is unlikely to happen) it may be because of this. If you are running Windows and think you were unfairly banned, then it is possible that your computer is infected by “zombie” software that allows hackers and spammers to control your computer. You might want to scan for malicious software — viruses, spyware, etc. — on your computer to see if this is the case. Those of you who use Macintoshes don’t have to deal with any of that baloney, so count yourselves lucky!

Because I’m short on time and this cleanup process can be very tedious, I might not catch all the spam as it appears. That said, I will keep checking the site on a periodic basis, of course. At any rate, if anyone sees any spam I haven’t yet cleaned up, feel free to report it to me and I’ll get rid of it immediately.