Akismet has been rocking my socks in spam prevention, but at present I’m finding it a bit lacking. A swarm of spam messages has been attempting to find its way onto my fair pages. Because I care so much about all 1.7 of you who come here on average and the integrity of Google’s search engine, I want to make sure those comments don’t see the light of day.  All comments from someone who hasn’t yet had a comment posted here require my approval.  Given my large volume of readers with the never-ending stream of comments, I realize what a labor of love it is for me to devote my every waking moment to filtering out spam, but I’m just that kind of guy.

So what’s the issue?  Well, all of the spammers post pretty much the same message.  It shows up in my browser as “??????? ?? ???????? ?? ?????,” or something like that, and all the associated URLs end in .ru.  Now, I don’t speak Russian– let’s get that right there– so what I say next doesn’t carry the same authority it would if those URLs ended in “.fr.”  For some reason I imagine written Russian having more than a single character at its disposal as opposed to this Morse code variant.  Perhaps some of you non-spammer Russian speakers out there can confirm this.

Why can’t Akismet pick up on this?  Russian link farm with no message content– seems like a no-brainer to me. The only thing I can figure is that the messages contain more than just question marks, but I don’t have the right alphabet installed on my computer. Which is just as well. I don’t want to learn how Viagra ads are written in Russian until and if I learn Russian for real.

For the time being I’ve shut down comments on my Apple Strikes Again post to see if that can exorcise the demon, comrade.