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| About spamming of my blog and the quality of posting here by Tansin A. Darcos (TDARCOS) 04/30/2012, 9:31pm PDT | ||||
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| I run my own blog at paul-robinson.us where I post comments about things I think are interesting. It is more than anything else a memory device where I post my thoughts and opinions so I can refer back to them, and I allow anyone who wants to read what I was thinking.
I used to have it open more-or-less the way Caltrops is so that people could make replies. I think I got maybe one or two good responses. Along with several thousand pieces of spam. People were posting links to what are probably pay per click sites run as subdomains in the .CN geographic domain, which is the country code for Communist China. If I could have prevented someone from posting a message that had .CN in it or could have figured a way not to allow a URL to be clickable, I'd probably have eliminated 99% of the spam I got. What irritated me even more were people who posted spam that didn't work, they posted links that were invalid or did not go through. I can understand someone posting links so they can try to get Google points for incoming links or to get people to connect to their garbage websites that often sell stuff that nobody would advertise if they had to actually pay for the advertising, but to put up useless and non-working links, is basically to paint graffiti on my wall err I mean on my website. And bad looking graffiti at that, too! So I had no choice. I had to lock down my blog so that you had to have an account to post on it, and you can't apply for an account; if you want to be a poster on my blog, I have to issue you an account. I even post on my blog that if someone wants to make comments, to e-mail them to me at paul@paul-robinson.us and if they have any relevance at all I'll post them, even if I disagree with the comment. So I run my blog with an iron hand; I have to, if I don't lock the place down the spammers come in and ruin it. I'm reminded of the story of a catfish farm that someone opened the wrong gate and the jellyfish - the locusts of the ocean - swarmed in and consumed all the catfish, that they measured it and they could go down as far as 20 feet deep it was still full of jellyfish. All those beautiful catfish destroyed by vermin. And so it is with spammers and scammers, if I don't lock my blog down I get flooded with garbage. Hell, the worst of the worst of the worst posters on Caltrops represent a calibre of fine commentary that is thousands of times more valuable than anything the spammers have ever posted on my board or anywhere else. Even someone posting a comment that basically says "Go Fuck Yourself" at least does two things; it indicates they disagree with what I have to say and they have said so in graphic terms. Spammers have nothing to say except their attempts to destroy the conversation with their worthless advertising having absolutely no value. There are, however, some people that send out unsolicited advertisements where the material they are sending does have value, however. I'm a notary public. Every four years I have to renew my commission in Maryland and Virginia. (They don't expire the same time; my commission in Maryland expires this summer; the one in Virginia expires in 2014). One of the things the application has is a box you can check if you do not want your name and address shared with marketers. (The Secretary of State routinely sells the list of people who have been issued commissions and have not checked the box.) In that case, what happens is that one or more companies that sell notary supplies will mail an ad to the people who got a new commission. In this case the advertising has value, a notary needs to obtain a rubber stamp seal, possibly needs to obtain an impression seal, may want foil seals, and all of this is esoteric stuff you can't normally buy in a stationery store. But by allowing these companies to send me and other notaries an ad, we get valuable advertising that does serve a purpose, it lets us know where we can order notary supplies we are going to need. |
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About spamming of my blog and the quality of posting here by 04/30/2012, 9:31pm PDT  tl;dr: TDARCOS posts = delicious catfish NT by 05/01/2012, 5:29am PDT Here's an unsolicited ad with a purpose: by 05/01/2012, 12:38pm PDT To quote Keanu Reeves in Speed: You first! NT by 05/02/2012, 1:35am PDT |
