A Note to the Blog spammers
People, I’m flattered you think so much of my blog. Really. I am. The superlatives you’ve used in your attempts to get past the wall here sometimes make me blush.
But at the same time, I know you don’t mean them. You make it blatantly obvious that what you’re trying to do is pay me off, in the coin of ego-boo, to advertise for you. And that you seem to think I’m so insecure as to value that attention, or so stupid as to not recognize what you’re up to, offends me.
Your approach is counter-productive. I’m not opposed to mentioning good products or services. But I’m the sole judge of that, and this particular judge is immune to flattery. I’ve worked inside large corporations, and the military (an even larger corporation) and I’ve written proposals for spending millions of dollars. I’ve gone to dinner with sales reps wanting four- and even five-figure commissions from me. People, I’ve been flattered by the best, and you’re nowhere near that league. If you think, as one sad sack recently did, that I’ve written a great post and want to say so, try at least not to select the “Hello, World” post to comment on.
Your idiotic vandalism is why I’ve moderated the comments on this blog. All you’ve succeeded in doing is annoying me and my visitors, and along the way getting maybe 24 hours of visibility for yourself, before I noticed you and rooted you out.
You remind me of the MLM sheep, who bleat along, following this guru or that without thinking about it. They never ask the one thoughtful, therefore unforgivable, question: “If this deal is so sure-fire and so wonderful, why aren’t you making a lot of money at it? Don’t tell me about some guru in the distance who claims to have made a million at this. Tell me why you’re not making a million. And when you tell me how many people have used this scheme and made a pile, tell me also about how many have done it and not.”
You seem to believe that if you work hard at anything, you will get rich, that dogged determination is all it takes. Determination is a wonderful thing, and an essential ingredient in success, but it’s not the whole recipe, people! What you do is as important (more important) than how often you repeat it.
“And what does the Lord require of you? To act justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God.”
Wow, I never get shamless flattery in my comment spam….unless you count the “loved your book” (WTF???) stuff that the Akismet plugin catches. Which is weird. The Aksimet plugin bundled with the latest version of WP is really a terrific spam filter. Between that and my blacklist I rarely have any junk make it to the moderation queue. But some of the stuff I’ve found when I’ve checked Akismet is weird. Like comments from an alternate universe or an alien planet. It’s hard to believe they’re selling something.
Sony/BMG is the only suspect inside the US. The rest come from chinese IP’s and generally point to .info blogs registered through publicdomainregistry.com. I considered complaining to the registry, but decided against it, as the poor guy might just be getting Joe-jobbed (The WCA website is going through that right now. I’ve had 4 posts from various addresses right now hit the moderation queue for messages to a test email list I set up a year ago and which has never been used for anything by anyone except my hosting service ironing out some kinks in their mailman support.)
The Chessmill’s spam list is more active. Generally music spammers, though the pill-poppers have rediscovered it. But the spam there doesn’t try to flatter me, like the spam here does.
The kicker was the comment here that started, “Excellent post and great blog! I just had to tell you how much I enjoyed it! May be I should switch my blog….” and went on to try and use me to sell ringtones. Why was that funny? Because it was a comment to “Hello, World!”
Hello, world, indeed! “Welcome to the Global Village. You’ve got Spam!” LOL! Weird since I have a music site that I’ve never been hit by any music-related spam. Maybe the spammers are exercising subtle criticism: “You call that music??” 😉 Are you running the Akismet plugin? Supposedly it learns from what it catches and what you can designate as spam/not spam. I don’t have any proof of “learning”, but it sure is darn effective. I would have lost my mind (and blog) without it.