3,747 words, 24,924 characters, 7 pages, 1 paragraph = SPAM
I've got another wonderful blogsite that I maintain for my Association. It provides updates to members on state and federal legislative issues, announcements from the National, State & Local Associations of Realtors, news flashes from our legislators, the DRE and Attorney General and all the kind of stuff you'd expect on a Government Affairs website. Some of the posts show up here on ActiveRain, some shows up on Facebook, but some of the stuff is just plain none of your business. It's super-secret, members-only stuff that would fry your eyeballs (yeah, that's how I roll).
We've
been live since the first of the year. It was slow catching on but we
seem to be rolling now - at least if I look at the AMOUNT OF SPAM WE
ATTRACT. And it's not like simple email spam - this stuff
comes in decoyed as blog comments. Most are just a couple lines of code
offering Eastern European Escort Services, Performance Enhancers for if
I decided to avail myself of the Escort Services, and a variety of
opportunities to make BIG money in A) Casino Adventures, B)
Loan Modification, C) Guaranteed Loans & D) offering myself as
an Eastern European Escort.
But
some - at least 3 or 5 every day, are loooong.
The statistics above are from one of those. 1 paragraph running for 7
pages - and not badly written. Some come in as the obvious result of
word generators but some appear
to have been penned by best selling writers (and in this
economy, maybe they are). They tell stories, cleverly working in a
variety of product names and links, and by the 3rd page you find
yourself hoping that the heroic Cialis truly does overcome his mortal
foe ED, and can ride happily into the sunset with his twin sweethearts
Avolar & Capromax.
I did want to give a
shout out to the tool that spares me from having all this crap show up
in the comment threads - a tool called Akismet. Free for public use,
Akismet has automatically
killed 2,226 spams before they hit my comments and without
me having to do a thing. I used to read through all the quarantined
items to see if maybe a legitimate comment had been erroneously flagged
but having found none (0) in months, my only effort today is to hit the
'Delete All
Spam' button and away they go. I also like that legitimate
commentors don't have to jump through hoops - no Gotcha's, no figuring
out the upside-down Cyrillic alpha-numerics, they just post. While
their comments don't show up immediately, it's usually no more than an
hour or two delay and even that could be eliminated if the admin kept a
window open.
Anyway, I hear other friends starting individual blogsites that they spend as much time fighting spam as developing content. I always recommend Akismet and have always had good feedback from users. I know it works on WordPress but it'll probably work elsewhere too. If you're tired of working through pages and pages of Spam on your blogsite, check out Akismet and see if it'll do the trick for you.
Of
course you may miss the next installment of 'The Four Hour Boner' with
Smilin' Bob, but it'll probably be out on VHS soon anyway.
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