I just finished wading through 471 new comments from the past 3 days on my blog post from late March titled, “How to spot a phishy email”. The good news, I guess, is my blog post found its way onto the search engines and is getting some visibility. The bad news – every single one of those 471 comments, along with nearly all the hundreds of comments before it are automated spam solicitations. The overwhelming bulk of those are for drugs of some kind. Ambien and Tramadol seem popular. I have no clue why.
A few comments are designed to stroke my ego. This one is typical, coming from IP Address 83.49.115.185 somewhere in Spain:
Its like you learn my thoughts! You seem to understand a lot about this, such as you wrote the e-book in it or something. I feel that you simply could do with some percent to force the message home a little bit, however other than that, this is magnificent blog. A great read. I will certainly be back.
Notice how the text is highly complimentary and also vague. The email addresses are always from Hotmail or Gmail or Yahoo or one of the other free services, and the names are always random characters and numbers.
I am an advocate of open and vigorous discussion and I participate in several technology forums and email groups. I contribute lots of comments and I help others troubleshoot problems online. I like to think that’s what community is all about.
But here, on my own website, I find I am wasting time wading through drug and porn and SEO pitches and evaluating whether each comment came from a real person or a spambot, and whether the comment is even remotely connected to the subject matter.
This is not what community is all about, this is a few parasites trying to freeload and use my website to sell their questionable and illegal junk.
I’ve had enough. I am turning comments off. My time is too valuable and I’ve worked too hard to build a high quality website and blog to allow runaway spam to consume my time. If you want to sell drugs and porn and questionable SEO over the Internet, you’re not welcome here. Shoo. Go somewhere else.
If you are a real person reading this and want to weigh in with an opinion or comment, even a hostile one, then fill out the Contact Us form. If it’s on topic, I’ll post it and give you credit for it.
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