I miss spam comments. Running WordPress with Askismet means I see little to no spam here which is a shame because I received some real belters in my time.
I’m not talking about the large list of links to various shady corners of the internet, I’m talking about the somewhat random poetry-esque spam that would crop up about once a week. A random sampling of text from Byron and Keats or somesuch, it made checking my spam lists all the more fun.
These days there seems to be only 3 types of spam comment:
- The Fast Show Jazz Man spam – Usually “Nice!” or “Cool!”. The most boring of the bunch, saved only by the image in my head of John Thomson in a smoky club.
- The Honest I read every word! spam – “Wow, that’s fascinating. I’m sure you’d like to visit our blog too.”
- The Feed Scraper Pingback spam – There appears to be an endless parade of feed scraping sites that list part of my posts with a link back to the original (which spawn a pingback). These are odd because they ARE usually targetted, my recent wine rack photo was listed alongside a page full of other, genuine, posts about wine racks.
Not entirely sure about the third one. Yes I still consider it spam but it is a bit smarter than most. I don’t see any traffic from these links though and as they are taking scraps of content from here then they are definitely being naughty… but as I publish a full RSS feed anyway, what do I care? Do I care that people are making money off of my content? Yes, I do. But do I care enough to do much about it?
So, fellow blog readers, what’s in your spam list?
Just spam comments or spam in general? If the latter then banks. I seem to have an account with every single one in the world and need to update my details almost on a daily basis. This is getting a bit tiring, I have almost no time left for blogging!
I hardly ever see spam coments now – and all the ones I do see are TrackBack crap. There’s been very little that’s been amusing recently – well, except for the one I posted about a couple of weeks back.
But no, generally it’s just dull.
Actually that last type confused me for a while, because it used to usually turn up on my film review posts and link back to a site with lots of other film review posts linked to. But recently it just seems indiscriminate, and every single post I put up I can guarantee that within five minutes I’m going to get a “We found an interesting post while browsing today, here is an excerpt” pingback, so I just delete them without bothering to look these days.
I miss spam fritters.