Getting more spammers than readers
Yeah, it’s a sad day for my blog — its comment counter has reached and exceeded the 1,000 figure. “Whoa, one thousand comments, duuuuude that’s awesome,” some of you might think… And you’d be wrong. Of those 1,000 comments, less than 50 are legitimate. Everything else is spam.
Poker spam clearly stands out from the crowd with most comments. Viagra and Cialis tablets are next on the list — some bargain, at $3.99 a dose. I guess the nerds who get turned on by hardware specs instead of members of the opposite sex really need those blue pills in their rare ocasions away from their keyboards. Number three: loans and insurance. Not as many as I expected, but still a noticeable number. And I don’t even qualify for those “great offers” from another continent. The rest of the list is pretty insignifiant, with links to weird BDSM stuff, and others that don’t pop into my mind now.
Having reached this milestone down the filthy road to Spamville, I can only be thankful for Dr Dave’s amazing Spam Karma, a complex plug-in for filtering out spam in WordPress, now at version 2. It has caught almost 700 of those comments since I installed it, with only two false positives and one legitimate comment tagged as spam (it contained a collection of URLs, too many of them apparently). Before SpamKarma, I had to check my blog daily and manually remove bad comments. It wasn’t a problem when this blog was very little activity and I only had to deal with 3 or 5 messages a week. Now, when it gets hammered by search engine spiders, newsreaders, vulnerability exploiters and spammers, if I don’t get 15 spam comments a day then I wonder if my webhost’s server is having problems.
I have reached the conclusion that spam cannot be stopped. It can be slowed down or filtered, but we, the netizens, will be engaged in this constant battle for a long, long time. Spammers breach new holes, we need to plug them. Considering the ratio between legitimate and spam comments and generalising it to the entire Internet activity, we can realize the scale of this garbage flowing in on our sites, inboxes and anything open to public. Nowadays, the Internet heavily promotes spoofed e-mails, open proxies, fake identities and personal data theft, instead of legitimate communication. It has become a world of machines, of automatic programs harvesting information for illicit purposes, of specialized tools finding vulnerable computers to exploit and millions of e-mail addresses to attack, where people are merely subjects tormented by the dark side of their own creation. It’s sad to see that, in a few hours, these words will be read, indexed and processed by more processors than brains.
