Under a Gibbous Moon

Yes, I shamelessly stole that title from a Smashing Pumpkins song.

Blog spam is something that anyone (and I mean anyone) who has had a blog for more than five or six seconds has had to deal with. Sure the amount ebbs and flows with the tides and your page ranking but it is still and omnipresent nuisance.

Blog spam is split into two categories, SEO spam and I-Hope-You’re-Stupid-Enough-To-Click-On-This spam.

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) spam is easily identified by the fact that it is not directly trying to sell you something but the comment is totally and completely irrelevant to the post (i.e. “You have a good grasp of politics” on one of my tech posts). The goal of this spam is to merely insert their web page link (from the home page text box)into the comment.

This creates a parasitic link back to what ever VD infested website the spammer happens to be hosting. All search engines, at least partially, base their page rankings (how close they are to the first result) on the number of links to a particular web site. The theory is, lots of links to a web site means that it must be good, or at least sells lots of Vaigra (sic).

The second type, IHYSETCOT spam, is the easiest to recognize. These comments contain one or more (sometimes dozens) of links to web sites of less than sterling quality. Clicking on one of these links is the equivalent of taking an unlicensed taxi in Tijuana, you’ll end up in some dark alley of the internet where you’ll have your identity stripped from you while they sodomize your bank accounts.

Luckily, both kind of spam are fairly easily countered with various anit-spam plugins for blog software, I personally use Akismet. So far it has only let one spam comment through and mis-categorized two, not too bad really.

Despite this, I do get tired of checking my blog and finding forty or fifty spam comments waiting for me. I diligently sift through them to make sure that no honest soul has been caught up in the nets.

At the very least, though, some of the spam is highly amusing. The English is frequently very poor (or nonexistent, a fair amount of my spam is in the Cyrillic alphabet). Some of them seem to be written specifically to start a flame war. Sometimes their oblique and generic nature happen to resonate with the particular post in a humorous way.

That said, though, spammers are truly some of the worst kind of people and to borrow from Firefly, there will be a special place in Hell for them, next to child molesters and people who talk in theaters.

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Related (maybe) posts:

1. Blog Spam Illustrated
2. A major flaw in the spam filter
3. So much crap
4. Geocities 1994 – 2009 RIP
5. When a man loves a computer