Dowbrigade Under Attack

Who is this Richard Davis, and what does he have against
the Dowbrigade? We have been suffereing from intermittent comment spam
for almost a year now, but as the attacks were minor and seemed to affect
only older posts, we didd’t worry about them.  But now, we have
been receiving literally thousands of false comments a day, clogging
our discussion pane, preventing us from seeing what real stories are
being read, and interfering with real people who might want to leave
real comments, rare though that may be.

We don’t understand much of the "back-end" stuff that
handles this on the server.  We did the only thing we know how to
do – we turned off comments.  We appologize to our human readers
but these spammers are merciless. We are consulting with smarter folks
to see if there is any other way around this problem.  Any tips
would be appreciated, except that you can’t tell us about them since
we turned off comments. Here is our latest log: