Some of you may have noticed that we got hit hard by a Turkish spammer last night: several hundred comments, mostly saying the same thing, all linking back to a farm of Turkish spam sites. It’s extremely annoying, and I’m in the process of cleaning it all up. Normally that wouldn’t take long at all, but right now Scienceblogs is seizing and sputtering, like usual, so I delete 10 or 20 at a time, get the stupid timeout message, and have to reload and restart the despammer tools…so it might take a little while.

And it is all so pointless. They get a few hours of their url on my blog, but what I do in addition to deleting their spam is pluck out urls and unusual keywords and tuck them into my automatic spam filter file…which, after a few years of this nonsense, is looking like a goddamned Turkish dictionary. That means that a lot of Turkish words and links get automatically rubbished if you try to use them here — there must be a lot of national pride over there in Asia Minor, where they’re doing a phenomenal job of making Turkish the pariah language of the internet.