To my legions of loyal readers: I’m sorry. Today I was forced to disable commenting on all posts. I had to break out the SQL kung-fu in order to clean the 400+ comments that were dumped into my blog. Then I used more SQL in order to disable prompting on all my posts. This all happened before I found this article bemoaning the sorry state of the Movable Type weblog. In a nutshell, spammers are getting extremely aggressive. I experienced this today, and decided to take action. I may end up bringing back comments in some form or another, but this is seriously making me step back and take stock of the situation.

The bigger issue, I think, is the problem of the utter lack of accountability. I’m having a problem seeing why it’s not O.K. to shut down, with extreme prejudice, sites which benefit from spam. Where is the government when you need it? I think the solution is to tie spammers to terrorism, and send them to Guantanimo. If the government is willing to shell out a few bucks to try to sell people on the idea that people growing Marijuana in their closets are contributing to Terrorism, why can’t they make the same leap with spam? Do we have any evidence that the profits from spam aren’t being funneled to Al-qaeda? Why don’t I ever hear of spammers being punished…ever? I wish someone had added a few lines to the PATRIOT act prohibiting spam on penalty of Abu Ghraib-style imprisonment. It would’ve made the it much more popular.

Comment spam may have a solution on the server side, if hosting services can coordinate, but realistically we may have to face the fact that the problem is intractible. Any technology developed will eventually be thwarted eventually. It’s an absolute shame that Lycos’ attempt to bring the war to the spammers was met with such heated resistance. It makes no sense when you make an analogy. Suppose an advertiser sent 500 pieces of junk mail to you every day, and the post office would do nothing to stop this flood. Is it wrong to send large amounts of mail back to the advertiser?