"please visit my blog for free ipod!!!"
So, I've started to notice my very first comments (a surprise, as I never really expected anyone who I didn't know personally to read any of this), and then, the sinking realization hit me: These Are Spam. More specifically, they're some sort of internal-to-the-blogosphere spam of people trying to get traffic to their sites. I've turned on "word verification," but I somehow doubt that's going to do a lot for me - it just forces people to do it by hand, and frankly, there's someone out there who will.
But now I'm faced with a question of etiquette, in a domain I'm totally unfamiliar with. I really feel like I should delete them, but would that be rude? Some of the comments, though generic, still say nice things to me - they could concievably be a nice (if generic) person trying to hunt around for like-minded blogs and share traffic. Or (more likely), they're heartless shills who have developed the Salesman's Smile, and aren't nice so much as pragmatic.
I occasionally write for a friend's blog and it was I who discovered the spam infiltration in the (largely vacant) forums. It was the same thing there - polite, generic posts that happened to include a link, which turned out to be scammish (like those "Free iPod if you buy all this crap and whatnot!" scams). I recently heard that blogging has positively exploded (with something like 10,000,000 blogs now in existence), and I'd wager most of it is crappy little Narcisism Projects like this one. So are blog comments and badly regulated forums the new Email Inbox, in the face of increasingly sophisticated spam filtering?
That said, I'd like to segway to something I recently discovered. I'm becoming something of a webcomic addict, processing them faster than satisfies my desire for daily humor. This led me to discover something everyone should enjoy. Visit www.spamusement.com and you'll see typical (i.e. clunky and badly phrased) spam subject headers reinterpreted in strange ways through badly drawn art. Hilarious.
For now, I'm going to see is this new filter kills my fledgling spam comments (spamments?). In a way, I'm sad. Being exploited by market forces is the first and best sign that someone knows you exist.
But now I'm faced with a question of etiquette, in a domain I'm totally unfamiliar with. I really feel like I should delete them, but would that be rude? Some of the comments, though generic, still say nice things to me - they could concievably be a nice (if generic) person trying to hunt around for like-minded blogs and share traffic. Or (more likely), they're heartless shills who have developed the Salesman's Smile, and aren't nice so much as pragmatic.
I occasionally write for a friend's blog and it was I who discovered the spam infiltration in the (largely vacant) forums. It was the same thing there - polite, generic posts that happened to include a link, which turned out to be scammish (like those "Free iPod if you buy all this crap and whatnot!" scams). I recently heard that blogging has positively exploded (with something like 10,000,000 blogs now in existence), and I'd wager most of it is crappy little Narcisism Projects like this one. So are blog comments and badly regulated forums the new Email Inbox, in the face of increasingly sophisticated spam filtering?
That said, I'd like to segway to something I recently discovered. I'm becoming something of a webcomic addict, processing them faster than satisfies my desire for daily humor. This led me to discover something everyone should enjoy. Visit www.spamusement.com and you'll see typical (i.e. clunky and badly phrased) spam subject headers reinterpreted in strange ways through badly drawn art. Hilarious.
For now, I'm going to see is this new filter kills my fledgling spam comments (spamments?). In a way, I'm sad. Being exploited by market forces is the first and best sign that someone knows you exist.
posted by Belarius at 11:47 AM
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