Anonymous

[koganbot]

My livejournal is set so anyone including anonymous posters can post comments, in order that anhh and Chuck etc. will be able to comment, including people I genuinely don't know but who've had lots of smart stuff to say about, e.g., T-ara. It was anhh's anonymous comment on my "Nobody" post, and his and petronia's followups that day and again six months later, that opened the door to K-pop for me. (And in the very same comment he introduced me to jerkin'.)

One consequence of keeping comments open to all, though, is that I've been fighting an ongoing war with spambots. Recently, it became almost overwhelming, my logging in and having to delete 20 spam posts at a time, every few hours.

Apparently, livejournal decided to do something about it, since most spam comments have stopped. Presumably, if the comment triggers the lj spam algorithm, lj either blocks it or at least hides it for my approval. Unfortunately — and this is necessary, otherwise the spammers would keep going — lj doesn't notify me of the attempt to post, so I don't see the comment unless it's on a thread I'm looking at and I see the invitation to view a suspicious post. Since no system is perfect, I worry that some legitimate posts aren't going through. So, if you've posted anonymously, and your comment doesn't seem to have gone up, let me know. And I'll take a look. If necessary I can post it for you.

Btw, from what I can tell, lj also lets you comment using your ID from Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Mail.Ru, VKontakte, and OpenID (I'm not sure how the latter works, but I know you can identify yourself using a Wordpress moniker, among other things).

Mississippi John Hurt "Frankie"

Watch on YouTube

[UPDATE 2014: I've finally disallowed anonymous commenting, but as I said above, you can still comment even without a LiveJournal account by using your ID from Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Mail.Ru, VKontakte, or OpenID.]

Comments

[davidfrazer.livejournal.com]

Looking at your Nobody post, I see you wrote that the Wonder Girls "Seem like a variation on NY-Miami 1988". Does that mean what I think it means? :)

[koganbot]

Yup!

[koganbot]

Spam is back, but so far in small amounts.

Well, there's spam, egg, sausage and spam. That's not got much spam in it.

[davidfrazer.livejournal.com]

Re: Well, there's spam, egg, sausage and spam. That's not got much spam in it.

[koganbot]

Spam now back in large amounts, e.g., spam spam spam spam Frazer spam and spam. And lj seems to have stopped the hide-and-ask-for-approval maneuver. So we'll see.

Re: Well, there's spam, egg, sausage and spam. That's not got much spam in it.

[koganbot]

Actually, they've continued to hide-and-ask for some suspicious comments, while letting others go through.