If you happened by here between roughly 5:30 and 7:30 U.S. Central Time today, you may have seen a cockroach infestation long list of spam comments. I'm not sure what happened--whether something was wrong with TypePad's spam catcher, or this was just a particularly clever spammer. Generally at least one or two of these get by every day, and I delete them as soon as I see them. It's very annoying, and probably risky for anyone foolish enough to click on the links they offer. Since they usually attack older posts, I've changed the settings so that comments are disabled on a post after thirty days. That means, unfortunately, that Janet's Undead Thread is going to be closed, at least for a while. It's a frequent target for spam, I suppose because there are already so many comments on it.  I think I can still open up specific posts, so I may re-open it later. I really don't want to start using a "captcha"-type thing where you have to recognize letters in a graphic. Have you tried to post a comment on a Blogger blog that uses this lately? They've gotten really difficult, I suppose in response to the creeps writing software that can analyze a graphic for letters. I had to try four times the other day to leave a comment on a blog the other day. I would have given up if I hadn't already spent a couple of minutes writing the comment, but I won't be doing it again.

What vermin these people are. If you don't work in IT, you may not be aware of the huge amounts of money and effort that go into fighting spam, viruses, and other forms of software aggression. I can't remember the number offhand, but the email system where I work gets many times more spam than legitimate email. Without a specialized machine that does nothing but monitor the mail and intercept spam, our email system literally could not function.