Skillzy has now closed comments on his older posts, and for good reason. Many of them are the target of spam. Just to give y’all an idea of what this here little blog has to deal with in a day, here’s a screenshot of my the referrals section of my tracker:

Each of those colored URIs either do not resolve to any webpage on my browser, or lead to placeholder pages or marketing pages. This is either innocuous “referral spam,” targetted to catch the attention of vain bloggers like myself, or, as I have observed happening before I closed my comments, each of those “hits” is an attempt to leave a spam comment on a previous post.

There are good plugins for WordPress that combat comment spam, such as Spam Karma or Kitty‘s Spamwords and Spaminator, but I’ve chosen the more extreme of measures. Hey, wanna leave a comment on an old post? There’s an easy-to-solve “puzzle” to get my email address in my colophon.