I get cluster-bombed by a spammer; undoing the damage takes up all of my blogging time today

When I got up this morning and came out to check up on the online world, I was amazed to open up my email and see that a huge, huge, number of comments had come into my blog, dropped in all over the place. They were all spam, from someone claiming to sell football jerseys with links back to his site - a phishing site.

So I had to go through and remove every one. I have no more time left to blog today.

I have always resisted the idea of putting filters on my comments and have just left them open so that anyone could leave a comment at any time without having to type in any kind of code like you see on so many sites and without having to wait for my approval to see their comment appear.

For the most part, this has worked well. From time to time, a bit of spam has worked its way in but the numbers have been small enough that it was not that difficult to remove.

As bad and time consuming as today's cluster-bombing was, it occurs to me that it could be much worse, that the robot that did this could probably do the same to every single post that I have ever put up and multiple times - and could just keep them coming. It could create a situation that would be almost impossible to deal with.

So, sadly, with great reluctance, I have decided that I must put some filters up for my comments.

I would also note that yesterday in my statistics I saw a strange pattern emerge, where someone would come to visit from the "Bloggers Choice Awards" site and then would hop about my site, downloading pictures.* Later, the same thing would happen again.

My theory was that this was a very dedicated voter who was downloading pictures from various sites so that s/he could study and compare before casting an informed vote.

Now I think it was the spammer, because every site that I remember seeing appear in this manner got spammed. I do not know what they intend to do with my downloaded pictures.* The same pattern is repeating itself today, so I think the same perpetrator is preparing another cluster bomb attack for tonight.

As to the above image, I drove into Anchorage late yesterday afternoon to pick Margie up from her Jobe-babysitting stint in Anchorage, as Lavina has today off and so Margie would not be needed.

I am still jet-lagged and yesterday morning I woke up just before 2:00 AM and could not go back to sleep, so I got up at 2:30 and stayed up. I felt okay most of the day until I picked Margie up and then it all hit me, so I asked if she would drive home and she did. At one point, I was trying to nap but I opened my eyes and saw this blue pickup truck turn off the freeway onto the exit just ahead of us. 

I thought what was about to happen might make a good picture, so I removed my pocket camera from my shirt pocket and shot. I then put my camera back in my pocket and closed my eyes again. 

I may just wait until Sunday to post again. Now that it is summer, I find that on Saturday's the visits to my site drop way, way, down as people go out to play. I wouldn't mind playing a bit myself.

*Update: I have done a little research and have learned that anytime a viewer looks at one of my images in slideshow view, statistics shows it as a "picture download," even though no picture has actually been downloaded into someone else's computer. So this is a bit of a relief. It does not appear that the spammer downloaded my pictures at all.