Deborah Lipp

So if you don’t blog, let me tell you about comment spam. A year ago, most of it was just a paragraph of links. Some of it was smarter. It would be a fake blog post with a neutral phrase like “Hi” or “I agree with you” or “Great blog” and then the spam link would be in the signature. Some of those are actually pretty clever and you have to read closely to determine they’re spam.

I assume, from the point of view of the spammer, that having to read closely is desireable.

But then these other spammers started appearing. They send you thousands of links in a single spam. Seriously. Thousands. When I open my spam filter, one spam comment will fill two or three screens. Or more.

What this does is allow me to scroll through all my spam very, very fast. And the other spam, the stuff I’d have to read closely, gets scrolled past just as fast. Because it’s all too much.

So you’d think that one of the groups that would be interested in stopping the crazy screen-stuffing spam would be the normal spammers. You’d think they’d step in or something.

But you’d be wrong.