Thank you for spending a bit of time reading this.

Whether to turn on the commenting feature on a site; or turn it off (due to fear of spammers and their ilk) is always a tough decision. If you turn it on, you get spam. If you turn it off then the world will accuse us of not being open minded. So what does one do?

If you don't want spam you have to make commentators jump through a little hoop called a "captcha". Well that gets rid of most of the spam; if not all. But then you still have some other kind of people. They are the one's who throw "FUD"s and harrasment into a website simply because it allows anonymity and then they walk away thinking that their dirty job is done.

What is a FUD? It stands for "Fear, Uncertainity and Doubt" (See link below). We didn't realize that we have made it to the big league because these FUDs being thrown at us are usually reserved for the big fellows.

Our website is one of the oldest in this category in India. We've grown up from being a very small organization to ... well, still quite a small organization ... albeit with a fairly large amount of work behind us. The work covers a lot of areas. Evidently this has rubbed one specific moron (who shall remain unnamed) the wrong way. This person, probably after much thinking, thought of the brilliant strategy of putting nasty comments and FUDs into our commenting system. So the person actually plods through our Captcha, labours over every word and then writes rubbish in our comments. (And to call them FUDs is just putting it very politely)

Well, the good news for that person is that we are actually going to welcome him with open arms! After all, somebody has to satisfy his deep insecurities and if he repeatedly keeps coming to us we must entertain him. (He's been at it for over eight years now. Not just here, but sometimes even in other places on the Internet where our presence is seen.)

We have decided that henceforth every little rubbish that we get from that person will be collected into special area linked from this page (so that it does not disturb the main contents). It will be a useful case study of a cyber stalker just in case some shrink is interested. We'll be putting up each entry of his along with the IP address for the whole world to see.

In fact, we already know who the person. How so? We simply rung up somebody in the company who is providing this moron his Internet connection, and we got to know the person's identity. But poor fellow, he must get his fix so we'll humour him and go along the charade. We are sure he will find some already known ways to obfuscate his tracks so that they are not so easily evident. Then he can go telling people with that extra pride and swollen chest, "Wow, I defeated the system! Now they can't trace the stuff back to me!"

To make the whole process a bit more automated (so that we don't have to spend our time collecting this persons crap and transporting it to another section on this site); we've implemented a email link process. Anonymous posters will now get an email back to the supplied email address where the commentator will have to click on a link for the anonymous comment to get posted. Those of you who are genuinely interested in making an anonymous comment, please use a real email address (even from some free provider would do) It should not take a minute more than needed to get your comment on our site. If you do not want this hassle, then you can always register for an account on our site.

Note that we do not moderate comments appearing at our site (other than remove reptitions and obvious spam).

From time to time we'll have some more links and notes here which could help someone else is going through a similar harassment. We'll also show you how to tackle this problem.

Links: