Delete

I am upset this morning. In my Gmail box there was a comment about one of my blog posts. The comment was in Japanese and it was to an OLD post. It wasn't anonymous (those don't come any more into my mailbox). So I went back to the old post and clicked on the comments button to see what the person had said. (Instead of reading it in Gmail.)

Once in my comment box I find that there have been many more comments. All in Japanese. And with my poor Japanese reading skills I tried reading one. Shall I say my face burned? Or that I burst into tears? Or that I felt violated? You get the picture.

My first reaction was to DELETE FOREVER! as fast as possible, which I did, but there were others. In fact, going back to the post box I discovered that there were 182 comments, the last 159 in Japanese and offensive. I spent about 30 minutes frantically deleting but I have not come to the end.

I do not want this filth in my comments box. Even though people don't really visit the old posts, even though they don't read other people's comments to old posts, even though all this junk is in Japanese, I DON'T WANT IT THERE!!!!!

I could delete the post altogether ridding my blog of contamination but I liked my own post...

The bigger problem is to how to protect this from happening again. As you know I have never put comment moderation on my blog. I find it a slight nuisance to put in passwords and stuff when I go blog visiting and I liked the trusting, friendly feeling of just allowing people to comment as they like. I've never had a real visitor who was offensive. There have been occasional spam like things that seem to be selling something or generically say "great!" and then ask me to visit their website but I usually ignore those or delete them. I had noticed that the number of spam things have been increasing but they have all been in English.

This morning's infiltration is all Japanese, and all within an hour or so... I do not know why that one particular old post was chosen and I'm wondering now how many other old posts have offensive comments in them that I have never been aware of... Do I go back and check all of them?

I will see what happens over the next couple of days... If this happens again I may resort to the moderation-password option. I will be sorry to do that but it is better than being afraid to read my own blog...

I'm going back to my deleting now...