Prairie Light Images

Dealing with Junk comments (aka Spam)

 

This posting is a bit of a deviation from the topic of photography, though it is relevant to the topic of blogging about photography. I refer to the bane of the internet; Spam!

In the Monty Python “Spam Sketch” the singing vikings were funny. In real life spam is an incredible waste of time and resources. Fortunately, I have a very good spam filter on this site, so the only real pain I have to deal with is deleting the damn things.

However, like the python vikings, sometimes the spammers do tickle my funny bone. I am particularly entertained by the fractured english and totally pointless commentary they foist off, all designed to get somebody to go to their website. Here is a sampling of some of the inane prattle that people are putting into blog comments and expecting anything other than deletion to happen:

How are you I really enjoy your blog. I linked to your blog on my homepage about the PSP-3000 so my readers will check out your site also.

Thanks a lot for this post

Really like the fresh look. I loved the information. Thank you for this remarkable entry.

…and so on.  The common hallmarks of these comments are:

1. They are sickeningly complementary.  With some of them I feel a diabetic coma coming on after reading them!
2. They ALWAYS have a link to a website completely unrelated to the topic or photography.
3. They are so generic that they could appear on ANY blog.

Really, they are just cheap attempts to get people to go to their websites.  These types of comments are a pain in the butt as well as disheartening.

As a blogger, you can protect yourself from frustration by setting your blog up to require your approval before any comments are published on your blog (wordpress makes this easy). Also, set yourself up with a good spam filter, like ASKIMET.

As frustrating as spam commentary is, it is a sign that my blog is being found by somebody’s ‘bot out there in cyberspace. Eventually, a real person does occasionally read the blog and make a meaningful comment. These are like gold to me. I have just come to the conclusion that, like panning for gold, one has to sift through a lot of junk before the valuable nuggets come up.

Posted on Thursday, October 13th, 2011 at 2:25 pm. Filed under: General stuff RSS 2.0 feed.