I’ve spoken about blog comment spam before.
It’s disheartening to start your day erasing spam caught by the Akismet WordPress plug-in.
And this morning, I’m sad to report that I passed the 20,000 mark on the Geeks.
That’s twenty thousand spam comments in 18 months.
And you know what? That’s nothing. Small potatoes. The Geeks have about 100 subscribers, and is linked to by a few other blogs, which makes it fairly confidential.
frogblog, which has an active community of commenters, has blocked twice as many spam comments in roughly the same time period.
I don’t even want to think what the super popular blogs have to deal with…
For instance, Akismet, which is only one of many providers of anti-spam tools, has blocked 3,763,536 spam comments in the first 6 hours of today.
And of course, comment spam is dwarfed by email spam.
Have a nice day.
Spam of any kind just makes me want to say « Get A Life. » What is the point? What is the motivation for putting this absurd and annoying form of pollution out into the world? Who cares?? It can’t possibly be worth the effort that goes into it.
I mean, if people are dying to take a peek at gay horse sex or shaved Asian pussy then wouldn’t they just Google it? Is there anybody who doesn’t know how to Google?
The only real good of services like Akismet (which I do thank my stars for every day) would be if the sources of the spam were immediately and without notice cut off from the Internet. Once people started having to deal with that, some steps would be taken to fight spam in a serious way. Individuals would have to start being responsible about taking precautions against those nasty programs that use their computers to send spam. When business and government couldn’t function, there would have to be a crackdown.
It’s a scourge and there must be more we can do about it… But, as with everything, it’s just a question of getting people to care. Not such an easy task.
It’s not such a big effort to spread spam. And all it takes is a few bozos to click on them links to make it worth it (by turning their Windows PC into a spam bot or raking up some page views on some dummy site).
And it is hard (technically) to distinguish spam from legitimate stuff. If it wasn’t, the Googles and Akismets of this world wouldn’t give you a chance to check for false positives.
Still, it only exists and thrives because banking on people’s baser instincts or carelessness or stupidity is a pretty good investment strategy…
That’s true. They say the only things you can count on in life are death and taxes, but I’d add stupidity and baser instincts to the list, no problem.