One of the many nice things about this hand-tooled blog is that comment-spammers had never really thought of it as a blog. It doesn’t look like a blog—or, rather, it doesn’t look like a blog to a machine. Plus, of course, there’s the cozy nature of its readership, which allows me to eschew exclusivity while still being able to have the whole readership sit on the front porch, if the weather’s nice. Not a lot of incoming links, not a lot of awards, not a lot of spam.\n
Of course, there is some spam, now and then, and my host’s hand-tooled audio-vibratory molecular spam-blocking device takes care of most of it. In the whole month of February, for instance, there were seventy-four spam comments, of which twenty-five were blocked by Jed’s code, leaving less than two a day that I had to actually delete by the tedious effort of three mouse clicks. Not so bad. And February was not an outlier. January had only 50 spam comments, and December had 123. November, in fact, was the highest total ever seen on this blog, with 188.\n
Until now. I’m edging very close to the thousand mark for March. In fact, I think I’ll just hold on to this post until I hit a thousand, which will likely be before I finish writing it anyway. Woof.\n
Jed’s widget has held up pretty well, by the way, catching well over nine hundred of the phony comments without any work on my part at all. In fact, the fivefold increase in spam has not actually resulted in any necessary new work on my part. I’ve done<\/I> some new work, looking at the subject lines of the comments and wondering why a spam comment meant to push wagering sites would attempt to disguise itself as a spam comment pushing porn sites, but then any work there is my own fault for bothering.\n
I can’t help, even knowing that these things are essentially costless and therefore need no deep and elaborate game theory to account for them, wondering why the sudden onrush. I mean, did they just figure out that this was a blog? Is this Tohu Bohu getting links here, there and everywhere? My Mad Google Skillz were able to come up with a not-particularly-spurious-looking search site that appears to now include at least some of my posts, but nothing else that looks particularly suspicious. Although, at some point somebody I don’t know quoted from one of my posts (which had been quoted by people I know), so that was kind of cool.\n
The other thing that happened was that in the three days or so when the spam attack was at hits (so far) height, we had some really nice and interesting discussion here, on two very different topics. At least two.\n
... YHB was interrupted in writing this, and coming back to it after an hour and a half or so, discovered that the current tally lies at one thousand, one hundred and seven.\n
chazak, chazak, v’nitchazek<\/I>,
-Vardibidian.\n<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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