Category: Pointless Digressions || By
A brief announcement: We have struggled for a long time with problems with our commenting system. We had problems a few years ago with people using other people's names to comment.
We asked people to use their real names, and we started tracking IP addresses of commenters. Well, we got complaints.
And we had problems with a lot of "spam" comments showing up. We turned our spam filters up to their maximum settings; that caused more complaints.
Two weeks ago, Tom Schroll from Skymagik Internet Services, which hosts Tube City Online (as well as the International Village website) called to report that we were suddenly getting more than 4,000 comments every hour.
Obviously, those weren't real comments. They were junk. About 20 percent of them were coming from a server in Russia, but others were coming from a network of zombie computers around the world.
The increased load was starting to affect the reliability of our server, so Tom and I decided to turn off all comments for good, pending a complete redesign and new software on the server.
(We will probably add comments through a third-party provider such as Disqus in the near future. Let their server worry about the hackers in Russia and elsewhere.)
Until then, you can always post comments on our Facebook wall, email me at tubecitytiger at gmail dot com, or --- if you really need complete anonymity --- send "snail mail" to Tube City Online, P.O. Box 94, McKeesport 15134.
Comments are now closed.
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