I was subjected to a pretty intense and sustained comment spam attack over the weekend. I thought I would turn off comments temporarily, wait the attack out and, after it had subsided, restore the site from backup with new and improved spam protection measures.

Well that’s not exactly how it’s going to work, obviously.

I’ve shut down my Blosxom script, and it won’t likely be coming back. While I think it’s possible that the script could be reconfigured to withstand such attacks in the future, my initial searches have not turned up any solutions that provide the features I need.

I’ve got a lot more that I could say about the situation. Obviously it’s a drag. I’d like to keep what I have, not let any of the links stay broken, make it better faster stronger blah blah blah. But I don’t have the expertise to patch the code myself, and Blosxom doesn’t appear to have been supported in any significant way for quite some time (and no offense to the devoted guys who are still developing plugins), as its original author hasn’t mentioned upgrades for over a year and a half.

Perhaps the nail in the coffin for me was the fact that Rael’s blog seems to have been overrun by comment spammers some time ago.

So, while it’s pretty uncouth to put up an “under construction” notice on a website, I think you folks will forgive me for saying that this place is a bit of a mess, and I’m going to clean it up before too long, and then once I’ve settled on a new content management system I’ll move it all back to the root folder where it belongs.

Thanks for visiting.