Spammy Whammy

My blog dashboard informs me that I have a very popular site. In addition to my five subscribers (of which I'm fairly sure only two are in this house), I have over seven hundred comments spread across all of my blog posts! Now, that sounds really awesome, right? And! To make matters better, I know for a fact that only one of those comments is mine.

As of right now, my blog has 752 comments! However, if you read my blog regularly, you might have only noticed, oh... 3. Because of those 752 lovely comments, 749 of them... were spam. Now, spam is getting tricky. Sometimes it's VERY obviously not about the topic of the blog, such as the "this is getting very subjective, but I prefer the Zune Marketplace...." in response to a post about someone's death. Other times, though, it's just things like, "This was a very informative article! Thank you for writing!", which, I admit, I might have been tricked by - if the name of the "person" leaving the comment wasn't "free sex videos" with a dubious link as their website.

I've been meaning to write this particular blog for awhile, as it's my biggest grievance with Wordpress - it's just so easily trolled and comment spammed. Now, you might be reading this on my Blogger or my LJ blog, in which case - no, I don't have these issues. However, the whole point of changing Tyger's Den over to a wordpress site was so I could integrate my blog with the rest of my concise internet presence, with links to other places I appear because... Well, a few years ago, there was someone else out there who was pretending to be me, and it got me into a bit of trouble with friends I don't talk to regularly. That person's since been caught and hasn't been at it again, but I'm careful to monitor everywhere I exist upon the web in order to stop that from happening again in the future.

Back to the topic, however - the spam comments range from the ridiculous to the inappropriate, to the "normal," except for their attached username or link. And I get, on average, five or six of them, spread across all blogs, every day. The blogs they choose seem to be random, but they do favor specific ones. The Tooth & Arrows in which I discussed Mario Kart DS is popular, as is my tribute to Elizabeth Sladen just after her death. Other posts, such as posts in which I'm giving actual advice, like the Shift Happens series, don't get any at all. Whereas a blog in which I comment that the reason my creativity tanked was that I hadn't been dreaming regularly draws comments such as "a useful idea! I shall have to attempt this in the future!". Pray tell how you will "attempt" to dream, you creepy little spam bot? Leave me alone!

Perhaps the funniest spam I receive, though, are the spams that are "advertising" a way to post comments across multiple wordpresses to "get your ideas out there". IE, Spambots that are ADVERTISING themselves. I love those. Which is good, because I get about five of them a week.

Just a request for those who will actually comment on this blog, you non-spambot people. But never say "this article" or "this topic" when talking about what the article is about... Please, be specific. Because I don't want to be marking comments as spam when they aren't. It doesn't take much - a few trigger words will do it, or even one. But vague comments and names and sites I don't recognize are likely to be marked as spam.

However, I can say this - I personally read every comment I receive. So even if I wrongly mark a comment as spam, rest assured that I have read every word of it.

Now, if someone could invent a mallet that smacked spambots off the internet, I would be thrilled. Can we do that? Please?

Now, let's see how many spam comments THIS entry gets.