How I Got Rid of Fox News Comment Spam

Jay Solo has written more than once (as also has Ed Cone) about the problem of Fox News comment spam: that is, completely off-topic brief comments which include a link to a Fox News story.

It seems a lot of blogs— including Accidental Verbosity, including Let the Finder Beware— have been receiving Fox News comment spam in recent months. I started receiving it in early March; it arrived pretty much like clockwork, once a week, Wednesday night or Thursday morning. I mean, on a thread which had nothing to do with either The Donald or babies, I would receive a comment like this:

Talking about babies did you see this...

Donald, Melania Trump Have Baby <link to Fox News story>

At first the Fox News comment spam was posted by someone called "Luther"; then it simply came from "Anonymous." I'd always delete it as soon as I received notice of it. The next week, another different snippet would appear— at first, always in the same thread from back in early March. After a couple of months of this, I closed that thread to new comments; and the next week new Fox News comment spam began arriving in another, newer thread.

This was a post about a dream I had, a dream about swimming around out in the water. It drew off-topic comments like this:

Rove Blames Bush's Job Approval Ratings on War in Iraq <link to Fox News story>

worth reading

Again, I'd delete the comment spam ASAP; and again, every Wednesday or Thursday "Anonymous" would be back, in that swimming-dream thread, with more Fox News comment spam.

Finally I got a bright idea. Around the beginning of June I left the following comment in that thread:


And voilà! Here we are, coming up toward the end of June, and I haven't seen any Fox news comment spam on my blog in weeks. Though I'm not sure how well it would work if all of us started doing this on our blogs... ;-)