Several people have reached out today saying that a large number of spam comments had appeared on their websites under my name. I need to make this clear: those comments were not posted by me.
From the reports I have received so far, all of the affected sites are using the Valine comment system. Valine allows anonymous comments and lets commenters customize their displayed information. Since much of my personal information is publicly available, it is not difficult for someone to impersonate me and use that identity to leave spam comments. Personally, I have neither the time nor any reason to do something like this, so I hope those who have filed complaints can look at the situation rationally.
I also want to say this directly to whoever started it: what you are doing has already caused a very negative impact, not only on me but also on many bloggers. Whatever your motive is, stop this pointless behavior immediately. If you think the Waline project is good, you are welcome to star it. If you think it is bad, you can criticize me directly in the comments. What you are doing now only shows boredom and immaturity.
Since the reports so far all come from Valine users, my personal suggestion is to install Valine-Admin, or switch to the Waline comment system I previously developed. Both can quickly add Akismet-based spam filtering on top of Valine, which should help reduce spam comments to some extent.
If you still have the spam comment data, you can also provide it in the comments under this post. It may be possible to check whether the IP addresses, email addresses, or other details offer any clues. Unfortunately, the people who contacted me had already deleted the comments, so there is currently no way for me to investigate further.
Update: A few spam comments were later found through email notifications. However, the IP addresses, user agents, and similar information were either missing or forged, so they cannot be used for tracing the source.
Another point worth noting is that this only started happening recently, and all the reports have come from Valine users. It is reasonable to suspect that someone may have taken advantage of the situation after I published the article about why a Serverless-based Valine setup may not be as ideal as it seems. LeanCloud’s services also appear to be down at the moment, and the large volume of spam comment writes may be one of the contributing factors.
