ELLIE'S BLOG on Living Well with MS

My first instinct is to apologize to my readers who've had to read through the comments of  spamming to get to the bottom of the list to be able to make a comment.  I have to admit I haven't been on top of it as I should have been. But it has been increasing tremendously over the past month.  In fact according to Symantec the Rustock botnet which is responsible for a significant portion of the world's spam resumed activity at a high level after Christmas.  For more information go to:http://www.zdnet.com/news/rustock-botnet-is-back-and-so-is-spam/498654?tag=content;search-results-rivers

I do check my comments and if someone was making a nice comment from a work site I figured that were just logging on from work. So I just let it pass but when I started getting repetition of comments I started to check more closely.  Now I edit much more carefully.  I go to the commenters web site and now delete anything that doesn't seem appropriate. I don't want to delete comments from genuine readers who happen to be online at work. So I may err on doing this. People do go  on the Internet at work.

When I first started my blog I was just thrilled if somebody made a comment on it.  I originally started my blog on the encouragement by my  sons.  I had started  writing these essays about subjects that were bothering me. I found there were all kinds of things I wanted to say but I was stuck in my home and I had no one to listen to me. Now my family was reading these and was expressing their thoughts on my articles.  But mostly they were saying , " I did not know this and I'm glad you wrote this because I understand so much better.  So my younger son set me up with my current blog.  Maybe it was also nice for them not to have to feel they had to read and comment on my thoughts etc,.. However they still do read my blog.

  So what I've tried to do with this  Blog is to take a topic that I find interests me. Then I ask myself could I  bring  another viewpoint  of a personal perspective to this subject that could be useful to people.  I didn't want to just write to the choir so to speak. But also to someone who was on-line and was looking for information not just for their own  condition but maybe for  someone they knew that had a problem. I hoped that a  more personal type of  blog could be helpful to get not just information which I believe is very important but a personal and  emotional perspective too..

So now thanks to the Spammers I'm spending a lot of time editing every comment to figure out it's a spam on not instead of writing on my blog.  If I had a lot of energy it would be easier to justify it and I could do both.  But as I am right now in an MS exacerbation I just don't have the energy for both.  But I do intend to correct the situation.

I want people who genuinely read my blog and want to comment to leave their comments. I do not want spammers leaving their comments and I certainly don't want people who want to make a comment who read my blog have to wade through spammers comments.

To hopefully prevent future spam, my son has added a Capcha plug in to the blog.  So if you want to leave a comment, you will also have to look at a picture of several randomly chosen letters and/or numbers and type them into a text entry box to submit the comment.

According to my son, there were initially some problems with the Capcha system trying to draw characters not in the uploaded fonts.  Meaning a group of characters were being shown as box's, with no clue what they represented.  He's tinkered with the settings and it should be fixed now.  If not, clicking the circular arrow in the top right of the capcha image will load a different image which should hopefully be box free.  Please let us know if you run into this problem so it can be corrected.

And if there are any Spammers visiting my site on your time off, I've got some very nasty things I'd like to say to you, but I'm just too beat to say them.

                                                                                                 ellie