Some may ask why I don’t blog more often. The reason: Blogging is depressing. Case in point. In 2 days, I have amassed 974 spam comments. Now I’ve been meaning to install the latest wordpress spamfilter for the past week, but do you know how long it takes me to delete all the queued comments?
Over the last month, I’m averaging 1 comment by a real person every 2 weeks and by a spammer every 3 minutes.
Here are some interesting developments in the commentspam world. Apparently they go in cycles, starting with online-flowers to various kinds of drugs and investment opportunities. Particularly peculiar are the ones that recycle various laudatory remarks in various guises, “Hey, I just surfed into your website, and thought you did a great job designing it.” That’s right. Comment spammers are getting too darn polite. Another load of them started dumping quotations from Ralph Waldo Emerson and Tolstoy and the bible (for comment spammers, the URL’s they give bring better search results on google; that is their true aim).
Luckily the Asian spammers have not hit. I still expect one day to check my moderation queue and find 15,000 comments in some incomprehensible language. At least now, I can understand what’s being said.
I guess now’s the time to talk about spammers, the Commons, law enforcement and all sorts of technological solutions (which nobody has the time to learn about unless they’re getting paid to do so). My main concern (i suppose) is time spent on maintenance plus the evergrowing possibility that it could crash my database.
Controlling spam seems to be one more reason for favoring third party publishing solutions over self-maintenance. It’s the grafitti problem all over again. The preferred solution to graffiti seems to be the elimination of public space for vandals to spraypaint on. All this malarky about audience interaction via the web sounds nice, but will it still be fun?
(P.S. 3 new comments have been added to the queue in the time it took me to write this post).
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