One of the things that has bothered me with blogging is the overwhelming amount of spam I receive from bots and what I suspect just might be aliens from the Planet Xenon. Every now and then, for the sake of living an existence that equates to paddling upstream at the bottom of a waterfall, someone actually sends me a real blog comment. And most of the time, it would not surprise me if I delete it because it gets caught up in the tons of spam I receive as well.
I was reading an article today that was published a year or so ago by Mark of Bloggersjournal.com, and he made a bunch of interesting suggestions. I’ve always used Akismet, which is a pretty good spam collection service, but now I’ve installed a challenge (CATCHA) service that asks a random mathematical question (an easy one) before someone can leave a post. Let’s see how that works now. Of course, if you’re completely mathematically challenged, I apologize, but as I love math (those who know me definitely know that), it’s kind of my thing. I did decline the advanced calculus version, however, and the Sports trivia one would have kept me out of posting on my own site, so again, let’s see how this works out.
What amazes me is that this type of junk (the spam) actually exists. It serves no purpose, and I can’t imagine a SINGLE person in the world who actually buys anything that’s thrown at them with spam. Other than scamming someone who accidentally clicks on their junk links, I’ve not seen a single purpose behind it whatsoever.
But that’s just me, and people have often said I’m a bit strange. And not just the spammers either.
42.
QED.