I made a change last week to my comment system, where someone now has to put in an answer to a simple mathematical question (like “What is eight – 5?). The last few days, I’ve had zero spam in my comments section, whereas I was receiving about 30-50 a day.
On other subjects, yesterday was the start of Nanowrimo (National Novel Writing Month) where writers (or wannabe writers) spend the month attempting to write at least 50,000 words of a novel (or a novel in 50,000 words). I’m 4182 words into my novel right now, and it’s a part of the Tales of Reagul series I’ve been writing for most of my adult life. This one is called A Season of Kings, and it begins during the year 180 or so BCE near Rome and then continues on the planet of Reagul (which is what most of the novels have been about). For those interested, this is the series that actually involves the name that’s part of my website: littlesarbonn.com. One of the central characters in this series is Sarbonn, the Sorceror, and his two apprentices Walner and Chandlin. Anyhoo. Have a great Friday.
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.
For those of you who are reading this through an RSS reader or because it was imported from the original blog, you might not understand the concept of this post, but it’s getting to the point where I really have to say something. I have a WordPress-themed blog, where I have taken a great deal of work to configure the blog itself. It’s not your average thrown together blog, mainly because that’s how I designed it. But one of the things I’ve noticed is that no matter what I do, I can’t stop from getting hundreds of spam messages a day. And they’re ridiculous, too. I have yet to figure out WHY, and it drives me freaking nuts.
I get comments like this: “You’re definitely on the right track with this issue, and I read this blog every day because not too many people can deal with an issue like this one like you do.” Now, on the surface, you’d think, wow, someone reads my blog and agrees with me. But they don’t. They don’t read my blog, AND they don’t agree with me. Instead, they somehow spider into my blog and send random shitty comments that are generic in nature, meaning absolutely nothing whatsoever. Which causes me to have to go through and delete HUNDREDS of comments a day that are all stupid, ridiculous, and a waste of time.
Another one: “I love your WordPress theme for your blog. Did you do it yourself? Can you give me some hints on how to design my own?” In the beginning, when I received the first of 300 of these, I actually believed this was a sincere question from someone. But again, you have to focus on the generic level of the comment to realize this person is sending out these questions to EVERYONE who has a WordPress themed blog. Why they do it? I don’t know. They’re probably selling some stupid piece of shit spam thing that no one is EVER going to buy, but they’re convinced if they keep spamming people with their garbage, they will eventually get someone so stupid to respond that that person will also be anxious to give them money for ridiculous crap. Or maybe they’re trying to hack systems. I don’t know. I don’t really care. I just wish they’d stop.
Now, I’ll add this as well. Every time I make a comment like this, someone thinks he or she is inventive and sends me a generic response as a joke. Well, please don’t. It gets deleted with the rest of them because if it sounds remotely like one of these comments, I go at warp speed and delete them all. Which means, if you thought you were being clever, no one will ever know. I don’t say this to sound mean or uncaring; it’s just you don’t realize the magnitude of this problem. It is so out of control that I devote zero time to dealing with it as humor.
The problem with this is that I am pretty sure there are actually people who do comment on my posts and actually read what I have to say. This makes it that much harder to connect with them, and I really do want to connect with the people who read what I have to write. So, it would not surprise me if real comments are being thrown into my spam filter and deleted with the hundreds of others per day. I wish that wouldn’t happen, but what can I do?
Anyway, back to what I’ve tried saying before. If you’re really interested in communicating with me, PLEASE, and I emphasize PLEASE, make your comment have relevance to the particular post you’re responding to. Avoid being generic. If I post about Smallville, please talk about Smallville in your comment. If it’s about writing, please respond about something that has something to do with the topic of writing I was discussing. THAT will get a conversation going, and I’d LOVE to talk to you. It’s almost to the point where I’m thinking of just removing the comment feature completely because of how useless it’s been so far and how much spam I have to filter out of it on a daily basis.
There’s been a lot of talk lately about Google having to clean up its ranking system because other companies have figured out how to game the system. I find this somewhat interesting because no matter what I do, I can’t seem to figure out how to get more people to read my blog. I guess if I cheated and did all sorts of surreptitious activity, I could probably get a whole bunch of people to accidentally wander onto my site. But that’s just wrong, and it makes me wonder why so many other companies and people would do that sort of thing, when all it really does is piss off people in the long run.
The thing that really bothers me is the amount of “traffic” I receive from people who don’t actually read my blog but submit spam messages as comments. My spam filter catches 99 percent of them, but it bothers me that my spam filter has to actually catch them in the first place. Why would companies and people go through so much trouble to spam the hell out of someone’s random blog site? Why are there people spamming me with stupid comments that have absolutely no relevance to anything I’m talking about? Why would people include fake comments that are designed to fool me into thinking they actually read my posts and commented on them?
I’m talking about comments that say something like: “I really agree with your perspective on this point, and this has caused me to want to keep coming back here and reading your blog.” Fake comment. Not real. Someone bullshitting for the sake of some stupid purpose that has no significance to the bigger picture whatsoever. Why do it? Why expend your energy trying to fuck up someone’s blog with nonstop spam messages that mean nothing whatsoever to anyone?
And they spam the crap out of my spam filters, too. It’s not bad enough that one or two get through, but someone will spend days spamming the same message to my comments that say absolutely nothing but pretend to be actual comments to my posts. Why do it? What purpose does it serve to disrupt the normal postings of someone you’ve never met before, have nothing to do with whatsoever, and have no incentive to make miserable just for the sake of some futile attempt at gaining traffic that you’re never going to get.
