At SnarlyBoodle.com, we use a rather brilliant anti-spam program called Akismet. It’s a free WordPress plugin that has caught and killed over 2,200 spam comments so far this year - and we’re a teeny tiny blog site! Commercial sites are charged very low rates.

What gets me is the nature of these spam comments. Foreign script, blatant self-promos, mile-long lists of bogus meds and porn links, and idiotic statements or vacuous generic compliments with the sole purpose of placing a commercial web link on our page.

Spam comments pretend to read your blog, but they’re lying. These fake comments do not add content, so they’re wasting our time. They use bandwidth, thereby slowing down service. Scuzzy ads for porn and drugs and Scandinavian furniture chase away real commenters who wouldn’t be caught dead on the same page as spambot comments. Spam makes blog sites look like abandoned property, littered with disgusting trash.

Pingbacks are another form of spam. These are the little comments generated by some program that has recognized the fact that some other blog has made a link to our blog. Although this is still impersonal, we allow many of these pingbacks to appear as a small “thank you” for the link. Reciprocity to some spam actually feels like fair play. Go figure.

Of course, we would prefer real comments from real people - and we get some of those, too! We even get real responses from spammers, and although we usually leave their less-than-sincere comments on our pages, we remove any links back to porn or questionable products.

Examples of these lame spam comments:

• I really liked your well-done blog! The info you provide is impressive ! I think im gonna stick around and read about 5 more of your posts. Yours respectfully
• Портал просто замечательный, буду рекомендовать всем знакомым!
• I am to learning new English that you might help me. How to say “Buy cheap medicines from overseas through my link”?
• Did you try to run online business and failed? Your website makes only a few hundreds of dollars per month? Want to know how to make more? I will teach you how! AdSense Money Maker is the best software on the Internet today that builds Google AdSense ready websites automatically. It has slow building feature, lots of different templates, builds AdSense TOS compatible pages and is completely automated. You must see it!
• Submit Links to Social Bookmarking Websites Automatically! Get Thousands of Visitors! Increase Website Traffic and Income with Automatic Social Bookmarks Submitter. Prepare to upgrade your servers today – you will have thousands of real and highly targeted visitors who will make you the money like crazy!
• I really see the logic in your argument but I think you’ve painted your strokes
• Great information as per usual. I really like this glad. Off to google to do more research.
• 

  ... Spam, Spam, Spam...

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  movie galleries of hot wife rio http://moviecorpse.com/films/film_t_rex_back_to_the_cretaceous/ movie 1970s voyage [url=http://moviecorpse.com/hqmoviesbyyear/year_2006_high-quality-movies/?page=10]bottle shock movie[/url] mortal kombat 3 movie [url=http://moviecorpse.com/films/film_wild_seven/]wild seven[/url]
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As for spambot effectiveness… If only one tenth of one percent of one million spam posts gets a click-through, that’s 1,000 responses. And if the conversion rate (those who go on to actually spend money) is the industry standard 3%, that’s 30 orders. If their product cost $29.95, that annoying spambot just grossed $900 for the jerk who put the ‘bot out there.

Hmmm… you could really make some money here.

Hm.

Anyway, as an example of what we’re talking about, we’ll allow the posting of any spam comments that will inevitably come along to this blog. Links altered, of course.

Scrud Kelley

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