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There has been a sizeable gap in my postings. While I have continued exploring and jotting down ideas, I just haven’t posted them. I have also disabled the comments function.
It seems this little blog has been subject to a small, almost trivial, “denial of resources.”
The facts:
Before February of 2022 these scribbles had received a total of two comments — not surprising since there has been exactly zero “promotion.”
Then, in February, I posted a few paragraphs about the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Suddenly, over the next months, I received hundreds of “comments waiting to be moderated before posting.” Almost all were in response to that last post. With few exceptions, they were all in the Cyrillic alphabet. None were legitimate comments. Some were generic comments, but most were spam about everything from sex to gambling.
This became a significant distraction and a waste of the limited time I could spend developing new posts.
So I stopped posting.
Interestingly, this experience provides an “object lesson” in the “Strategic Denial of Resources.”
In this case the resources in question were my time and attention. These are, of course, finite. Dealing with the trash comments and spam took both and diverted the time and attention I could spend on other things, like posting. This blog is, for now, just a small side interest that I devote time to only when other things aren’t pressing (surprisingly seldom).
I am going to guess this was all an automated process — “bots” programmed to seek out the word “Ukraine,” and then inundate the targeted site to reduce its usefulness. It succeeded.
It took time and attention to finally learn how to disable comments retroactively on existing posts.
In the meantime, I continued to jot down notes, but didn’t post. Hopefully, I can get back to occasionally posting from this backlog.
The issue of comments may get solved properly later. As I don’t advertise the existence of this blog, only people in my circle of direct contacts might stumble upon it through my email address. For now, if any of my friends has a comment, you can send it to me directly.
Thanks!