A significant change...

[seawasp]

... I have been forced to now require comments to be made by registered users, disabling anonymous comments, because, alas, I've been getting anonymous comments from automated spammers.

Comments

[laptop-mechanic.livejournal.com]

I've long advocated declaring spammers a game species with no bag limit. =)

[nwhyte]

I do the screening of anonymous comments. Two-thirds are from spammers but the others are legit, and I don't like excluding the real people.

[argonel.livejournal.com]

Personally I think they should be declared a nuciance species that can be shot at anytime and with a bounty on their hands. (No need to kill them, just prevent them from spamming and I'm happy.

[laptop-mechanic.livejournal.com]

That works too.

[ravynstoneabbey]

I've had anon comments blocked, with non-friends screened for a while now, with IP address logging enabled. Had a mild freakout over some nasty troll.

Pity one has to do stuff like that, but when it is so easy for the spammers to propagate, drastic measures must be taken.

Too bad one can't hunt the spammers. But deletion would be nice.

[kengr]

My own "modest proposal" is simple:

Allow users to report spam to their ISP and they get $5 if it is spam. The ISP is allowed to go after whoever passed the spam to them for the $5 *plus reasonable costs of figuring out who it was*.

So this rolls on up the line until you either hit the spammer's ISP (who get to collect from said spammer) or some fool with an open relay or a hijacked machine.

For open relays, too bad. For hijacked systems, they may get a pass *if* their AV software and the like were up to date. If their software was up to date, then they get to go after MS or Apple or whoever.

The big snag is the spam coming from overseas. But that could be handled be requiring companies connecting to the US to agree to pay the spamming fees as a condition of connecting.

All of this would give businesses a rather major incentive to hunt spammers and to fix software.

[roseembolism.livejournal.com]

For my part, since registering for LJ is free and easy to do, I really can't see why anybody would even bother to post from an anonymous account. But that's just me- others obviously feel they have some legitimate reason to do so.

spammers

[axolotl9.livejournal.com]

yeah, i've had anonymous comments screened since about my second month on LJ. most of them are just people who forgot to sign in but occasionally there's a spambot in the mix.

spammers delenda sunt.