Spam spam spam spam spam spam spam spam spam.
I typed that. No copy-paste. It's legit.
In an effort to make this more of a two-way dialog, to not exclude people with something to say, I make this blog a bit more vulnerable to spammers. I allowed anonymous commenting and I removed word verification.
Since then I've had some spam. I don't like it.
It confuses me.
It tends to be on old posts. Not the day before, the week before, or even the month before. I find spam comments, NEW spam comments, on posts from November. Now I'm not expert, but I don't see how that is productive for them. Perhaps there is no cost to it, but I'd expect they'd target it at new posts, ones that people might actually see.
It often doesn't sell anything. It has random words or sentences which don't say much. No links, no product names, just generic words like "I found this useful for my trip to college thank you for very interesting!" I'm assuming this is spam and that I don't just have a few very stupid posters responding to very old posts which have absolutely nothing to do with what they say.
Sometimes they have links, but they are broken. The tags they use don't work, so they just look like giant messes. Would it take that much effort to check how the target handles tags and adapt the spambot? Bah, who am I kidding? These are the equivalent of the misspelled guild ads which brag about bank slots and use no punctuation other than exclamation points.
Maybe I'm looking at it all wrong. Useless spam in outdated posts aimed at a blog with no practical use which frequently talks about old content. Maybe the spammers have it figured out perfectly. Except they don't seem to realize that there's no profit to be had here.
What to do?
I don't plan to remove anonymous commenting. Since I'm not getting trolls, I see no reason that people should have to identify themselves, making some sort of account, just to respond.
I am considering putting back on word verification. But I must do a cost-benefit analysis. The spam is annoying, but is it annoying enough to warrant the annoyance of word verification? So I put to you: how annoying is word verification on a scale of 0-10 with 0 being no annoyance and 10 being you won't post with it and 11 being due to technical issues you can't post with it.
What took the loot boxes so long?
1 day ago