Wednesday, August 31, 2005

Join the Fight!


I went to my mom’s blog the other day to find that she had ten new comments on a post no more than an hour old. Not that I think she shouldn’t be getting comments mind you, in fact this was her best post ever, it’s just that she rarely gets any but mine. So I check out who has been leaving notes. They all started kinda like “Hey, I’e been reading your blog. I think you have a great writing style…” or “Wow that sounds really great. I really like your blog…” but then they start talking about how you need to check out their site to find out more about a new diet pill or on-line dating or whatever. It was like opening a cupboard and finding rat feces, yes the telltale sign that blog-spammers had been there.

I don’t know if any of you have been troubled with this insidious advertising scheme yet but I guarantee that you will. I was pissed when I saw it. I know it wasn’t my page but still she had TEN spam comments in just about an hour! I felt like the sanctity of blogers everywhere had been violated. Maybe I am naïve because I didn’t realize what a problem this was. Well, now I’m pissed and I’m going to do something about it.

If you are having this problem on your page then you can add what is called “Word Verification”. I am not sure how well this will work but I did link back to several of the spammers home blogs only to find that they use it so it must be worth it. (Yeah, spammers who don’t want to get spammed…fuckers.) Anyway, another thing you can do is called flagging. This is where ever vigilance comes in. YOU the blog community must police yourselves. When you press the “Next” button on the blogger nav-bar and stumble across a spam blog you need to flag it so that Blogger will know to come back and look for it. They will delete spam or illegal materials. Remember this is not about censorship this is about keeping this space sacred and free. We all have to work together to keep these fuckers out. If you find a spam page make some rude or mean comments then flag the bastard, I know I will.

If any of you find a better way of knocking back spam or of fighting it then please post a comment to tell us all. I found some but they were rather tech and script heavy. Frankly I don’t have the skills required for any of that. There is no legislation against it so as to make it punishable by jail time. I guess this is just another one of those things, if you own a mailbox you’ll get junk mail, if you have a phone line you’ll get sales calls, if you have an email account you’ll get spam, and now if you have a blog you’ll get comment spam. Dirty motherfuckers.

5 comments:

LJ said...

I can't stand comment spamming. It's so exciting to see that you have a new comment, then such a let down when it's just spam. I really like to word verification option, although I'm still skeptical about whether or not flagging is censorship.

Brillig said...

I think its just our, the blogging community's, responcability to make shure that the "flag" feature isn't abused. You may not like what someone has to say or how they say it but Blogger has given us a great tool to fight spamming, we need to be mindfull of how we use it.

cj said...

I agree that some people may use the flagging to remove comments they don't agree with but I consider the fact that I may get comments opposing my opinion as a risk I take when I choose to publish online. You know me, I'm a debater and I don't take it personally just because someone takes an opposite view. That being said, I DO vigorously object to people who misuse a public forum to shamelessly advertise. And in this case, I don't beleive that there was an actual person who made the comments on my blog in real time. I beleive that some how those bloggers had set up a generic reply that automatically posts when a new blog entry is published. I don't know how they did it. I'm not that advanced. That just makes it that much more reprehensible to me...that they would take up comment space without actually even reading my blog!

super_spam said...

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Singularity said...

Seriously I HATE spam. I mean some must like it or it wouldn't still be out there but really people enough is enough... If you can't afford real ham nowadays your worthless. Ham is the real deal, fight spam.