Ministry of Propaganda - 29/Jun/2006: "Venting Frustration About Spammers"

[Previous entry: "Intel's CTO is Blogging"] [Home] [Next entry: "H1 2006 Blog Discoveries"]

Venting Frustration About Spammers

Yes, I know, it's a waste of time and words to blog and complaing about spammers. They won't read this and it won't stop them. It might even attract them, I've noticed that entries about spam receive more spam than others. But at least for a moment it will help me writing down my frustration about those ********* (trying to keep this blog work safe).

Four months ago I deleted the forum for the blog, a year ago spammers killed the guestbook on one of my other sites, bit by bit (pun intended) spammers and other crooks are killing interaction, communication and motivation for publishing on the web. And I'm not alone, vowe says: One of these days, when I am tired of these jerks, I will just shut the site down.

At the same time the arms race continues: With Bayes and other text based filters getting better the spammers just move to more and more sophisticated images. While I can follow their logic I still can't understand what they must be thinking: 'Those people don't want to receive my mail and try to stop it, so I'll invent ever better methods to go past their filters'. Why are they trying to force these things down our throat when we clearly don't want them? Why don't they just send it only to those people who buy the rubbish they peddle?

The waste is just unbelievable:

This weblog doesn't have comments, the form at the bottom of each entry just allows readers to quickly and easily send me feedback. I still receive tons of comment spam through it. My spam filter usually takes care of it, so apart from the bandwidth I'm not too worried. Still, it's a waste of resources.

To make matters worse though, I've started to receive comment spam through the feedback form of one of my other sites. Yes, you read that right, comment spam through a normal feedback form. How do I know it's comment spam? Well, if you receive a mail through the feedback form only containing a string of this: [url=http://www.example.com/]Spam product du jour[/url], what else can it be? The spammers don't even check where their stuff is going, they just send it indiscriminately. Bandwidth and zombie computers must be cheap these days.

Currently I probably receive 100+ of these every day. I know of others getting far far more than that. I've even heard of blogs being shut down because of the load on the server being unsustainable.

And it doesn't stop there: Recently someone asked me why I only offer partial feeds on my blog(s). My answer was simple: Scraper sites and spam blogs. Even with my partial feeds I've already found my feed content on various spam blogs. I have no intention to make it any easier for those thieves to steal my work.

Right, that's that out of my head. Will it change anything? Of course not. But it feels good for the next 30 seconds, until the next spam e-mail comes in. That's good enough for now. Next time I'll try a spell. I wish that all spammers will grow a huge ugly wart right on their nose. And that they will have a permanent nasty headache, one of the really painful head splitting variety. And in addition to that turn all lime green, no, flourescent green. Well, something along those lines, you get the idea.

End of entry

Entry trivia

When writing this entry the weather was: clear, mild
When writing this entry I was listening to: BBC 6 Music
I'm currently reading/have just finished reading this book/publication: Watching the English - Kate Fox
I recently visited this website/-page: none
The last drink I had was/is: Macallan

End of entry trivia

Advertising section

End of advertising section

Spread the word:

Do you like this weblog? Do you think others might be interested in it? Then please tell a friend! Thank you.