Once upon a time, and long before the evil, fanged Facebook consumed the conversations of the internet, readers could leave comments on my blog. Most readers left intelligent and insightful comments on what I wrote about that day. They were delightsome to behold. Thanks to vigilant knights, trolls didn’t often blunder into our edifying conversations, but whenever they did stumble upon our happy kingdom, the trolls were quickly vanquished. Then one day, the king (which is me) decreed that Disqus would be the new conversation system for all because the old one didn’t work. Except that Disqus didn’t work very well, either, and so, after a time, the king switched back to Google’s default system. That’s when he, me, I discovered something was wrong. There were NO Google comment boxes to be found. I couldn’t even reinstall the Disqus system. My blog was corrupted on Google’s server. After a year of banging my head against the portcullis, scrubbing the castle’s layout TWICE, I turned all comments off, left Google Plus on, then gave up. And the people wandered off to Facebook to unfriend or mute anybody who didn’t agree with them politically.
Then sometime this year I started noticing that trolls were leaving spammy comments, but the comments were INVISIBLE!! They could only be seen if I followed the comment announcement link from the email. What evil magic was this‽ Most strange was how many trolls were having troubles with STDs. Good thing they found my blog to share their miracle cures with my kingdom! But alas! Because the comments system was corrupt, I could not delete the comments. Fortunately, they were invisible from users, so I left them there and continued to not post articles on my blog for the next several months. Then this month the spam began to increase. This time when I checked, the comments were showing. Hundreds of comments going back thirteen years (Finally!), but also the icky new one from trolls with socially transmitted discomforts. The cloak of invisibility had been dispelled. Curse those trolls!
All was not well. The database was still corrupt. The comments were there, but the controls were ghosted. Nobody could leave comments except the spamming trolls and their evil scripts. So I’ve disabled comments, banned Google Plus, and vanquished the trolls. Peace has been restored to my kingdom, and the few readers not scared away by STD ads rejoiced.
The End
