Thursday, June 21, 2012

spam

spam by Tall Scientist
spam, a photo by Tall Scientist on Flickr.
Why has Blogger started emailing me all my spam comments? I was quite happy with the previous system, where they emailed me real comments and sent all suspicious comments to the spam folder where I could check them at my leisure. Every day I have a handful of comments from "Anonymous" to dredge and delete. Yesterday I woke to eleven of the blighters, all from the same source! While these spam comments are annoying, a few of them do make me chuckle and I thought I'd share two highlights from yesterday's batch with you.

Most comments take the form of fawning flattery, which (of course!) I just LOVE to read, especially when the flattery misses the mark and is applied to the most inappropriate of posts. This is the spam comment I received about my "anal lard duo" post, where I blogged about the fact that my name is an anagram of "anal lard duo", pretty earth-shattering stuff:

"Excellent post. I am going through many of these issues as well. [link to high-interest short-term loans site]"

Well, I'm glad to have been of assistance! Perhaps we should set up a support group for us poor souls who have names that provide such filthy anagrams with bum references in...

On top of this, yesterday's spam comments yielded a rare gem - an abusive comment! The same commenter, who was so personally moved by my "anal lard duo" post, had their opinion of me drastically changed just moments later when they read my "smiling in the face of adversity!" post, prompting them to leave this comment:

"The very next time I read a blog, Hopefully it does not disappoint me just as much as this one. I mean, I know it was my choice to read through, nonetheless I genuinely thought you would probably have something useful to say. All I hear is a bunch of moaning about something you can fix if you weren't too busy looking for attention. [link to high-interest short-term loans site]"

Bit harsh, especially considering that post was about my 5lb-odd, just-reached-her-due-date premature baby being hospitalised with pneumonia and stopping breathing every time she fell asleep! And I thought I was really quite positive and restrained in that post!

Much as the inappropriateness of these random spam comments can make me laugh, I would really rather not have them emailed to me umpteen times a day. Does anybody know if there's some way to stop Blogger forwarding them? If not, I fear I may have to turn back on the annoying word verification feature.

You might be surprised to see me blogging here when I just said I was going to take a break from it, but I might have found a sensible solution to my blogging problems. It's kind of an ingenious plan, I think, but it does involve me turning to the dark side and joining Facebook, something I've managed to avoid thus far. I thought that if I posted some general chit-chat and photos of Dulcie on Facebook, then the people who make me a bit uncomfortable here (as my friend pointed out, people who probably are not particularly interested in what my blog was all about when I started it) could get their fill over on Facebook and would have no reason to hang around here. Of course, they might still want to visit now and again, but I can handle that level of lurking, leaving me free to blog without feeling like there are lots of heads peering over my shoulder as I type. And I really don't want this blog to turn into one huge moan-fest, so it would be good to have some sort of policing readership to keep me on the positive straight and narrow. Goodness only knows when I'll get round to joining Facebook (or who else might start stalking me as a result! paranoid? moi?) but I'm just quite happy to have thought of a positive solution and am enjoying feeling like this is my place again :)

2 comments:

  1. glad you're still going to be blogging - I would miss you! I was going to suggest moving to wordpress which allows you have private posts and passworded posts as well as normal ones, but your solution seems much better. although wordpress is also way better at dealing with spam so you might want to consider it anyway. Let me know if I can help!

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    Replies
    1. Hmm, might be worth thinking about. Thanks :) I never like the look of Wordpress blogs as much as Blogger ones, but I suppose I could probably tinker about a bit and make it suit my taste. I'll see how the Facebook thing goes and how crazy the spam situation drives me.

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Hello! I'm sorry that I've had to turn on the word verification feature again, but my inbox was being flooded with very dull spam. Genuine comments always brighten my day though, so thank you for taking the time to leave one :)