Oops!
Category: Navel Gazing...
Posted Saturday, September 09, 2006 at 01:37 PM [GMT-6]

I've had an onslaught of comment spam in the past 24 hours, dealing with 150 or so bogus comments (note to self: now might be a good time to investigate upgrading your blogging package to something with a captcha routine). After noticing that almost all the spam was linked to either Belgian or dot-info domains, I temporarily added .be and .info to my blacklist, and proceeded to delete all recent comments with those domains.

Unfortunately, my goofball blacklist plugin misunderstood my intention of banning .info and .be URLs and instead flagged for deletion any comment with either of those strings in the text...including my own comments because they were accompanied by my email address which, of course, begins with "info."

While I finally got a clue before doing major damage, I fear that I've inadvertently deleted up to 50 recent comments via this boneheaded move. If yours was among them, I apologize.

On the bright side, having to use "oops" in this context is much preferred to using it in another...as, say, a neurosurgeon in the operating arena.