Lost in a Grimm Fairy Tale

Once
in a long while, a precious few times in this cold hard life, we find
ourselves in the midst of a fairy tale. These
magical moments are invariably ended by a sobering dash of reality,
but while they last they are worth savoring and sharing.

For the past week or so the Dowbrigade News has been
suffering from an infestation of comment spam.  Unscrupulous evildoers
were using scripts or robots or something to send inane one line comments,
including a link to some site we never looked at, to virtually every
one of the 6,424 postings in the accumulated annals of the Dowbrigade.
These comments, which sometimes came in at the rate of several a minutes,
completely pushed legitimate comments (we don’t get many, but those we
get are choice) and the postings hit counts off our discussions
page.

To what end? As we understand it, each comment was counted as an incoming link to whatever page the spammer is pushing, making it rank higher in search engine results. It was driving us nuts, and we finally resorted to disabling comments
altogether.

Other than kvetching
on the blog, we pleaded in pathetic
emails to two higher powers. One was the Thursday
Night Berkman mailing
list, which includes most of the smartest people we know, some of whom
have shown surprising patience with a cyber ignoramus and dilettante
analogista like the Dowbrigade.

The other, at the suggestion of a member of the former,
was to the newbies
help list at Manila. Although we can’t program our
VCR (yes, we still have a VCR), we are pretty good at following directions,
and had faith that if there was a fix to this problem we could perform
the necessary exorcism, given expert guidance and detailed instructions.

Well, we absolutely felt like the shoemaker from the Grimm
Fairy Tale when we went to our blog this afternoon to see who was
spamming our comments today. Unbelievably, they were all gone! Not only
were there no new spam comments, but all of the nasty older ones, over
a thousand, had disappeared like magic! Elves or fairies (not to cast
aspersions) had gotten into the guts of the Dowbrigade and done the work
we dreaded and didn’t know how to attack anyway.

Surely there is some mundane, human explanation and
at some point some well-intentioned realist will burst our little bubble,
but in the mean time we are overjoyed with the result and prefer to ascribe
it to duendes. Now, let’s see if we can remember how to turn our comments
back on again. Gracias, muchas gracias.