Colorado Pols must really be making Putin mad

4 thoughts on “Colorado Pols must really be making Putin mad”

1. This has been happening for a long time on this site, and the junk posts are often in a variety of alphabets. I don't think it's Putin, but I do think there's a security problem here.

   Log in to Reply

2. This latest onslaught of diaries in Russian does seem to be more malicious than commercial in intent; those spam diaries used to merely be a way for bots to collect email addresses from people who clicked on links in the diaries, or a way to direct visitors to gaming, porn, TV or foreign sites.

   I ran one of the cyrillic diaries through Google translate, and found it was just the same old commercial content. I don’t know what the purpose would be of having those all in Cyrillic. 

   Log in to Reply

   1. We've always had to contend with some amount of spam as a trade-off for having a publicly-accessible publishing platform that grants access without manual input. In the past few months, the principal WordPress plugin we've relied upon for security has been rendered ineffective and these huge floods of auto-posted spam, often in Russian but many other languages including English, have been the result.

      As of this morning, we've taken the temporary step of fully disabling the automatic process by which new users are granted access to post. This should not affect the posting privileges of any existing users. We'll restore this functionality once we can do so without abuse.

      Whether Putin or spambots are the culprit, we'll outlast them as we always have.

      Log in to Reply

      1. Good. I think that disabling automatic posting access is a long-overdue step, which will hopefully eliminate the endless spam diaries.

         Log in to Reply