Blog: More Comments Section Mania

Welp…I did it. I finally angered someone so much that they decided to start spamming my blog in an attempt to get me to shut up. That was not on my 2025 bingo card, but I suppose it was inevitable.

Add that to my list of achievements.

What happened was that I came back from a hike on Saturday and opened up my WordPress account since I had a notification that I had a comment from an anonymous user under my “Flippin’ Fatwa Friday Part 1” post. I opened it and, for some reason, the comment just said “1.” That was it. And the other one from the same IP address also said “1.”

Not thinking much of it, I approved these comments, then noticed something funny. I had stuff in my spam folder, which usually never happens. I opened it, and there were four more spam messages from the IP address with the same message. I unspammed them (which probably wasn’t a good idea) and within a few minutes, I had a whopping 48 spam messages in the folder, and it kept growing. This time, the messages were more complex, with what looked like phone numbers, random URLs, code, symbols, and other things in them. And all of them were for my “Flippin’ Fatwa Friday” post.

This was getting weird.

I cleared my spam and took a shower. In the twenty or so minutes that I was away from the phone, the spammer (who I now supposed to be some sort of bot) had sent over a thousand spam messages and the number was still growing, this time also spamming on other posts going all the back to 2023. Thus, I copied the IP address, banned it, and emptied my spam folder, but this just moved everything to the trash bin, where the spam messages just kept growing. I continued to empty it, but there was a new message almost every 30 seconds. Even stranger was the fact that all my notifications had disappeared on my WordPress dashboard.

Finally, I called a family friend for advice on how to deal with the spammer and while I have fixed the problem for now, it’s now a requirement for the security of this blog that you enter your name and email or be logged into WordPress in order to comment. This isn’t ideal as I enjoy allowing everyone to comment, but it must be done to help avoid more spam attacks from disgruntled keyboard warriors. I might also have to install Recaptcha at some point, but I’ll cross that bridge when I get to it.

Until next time,

M.J.