One can hardly browse to any weblog without encountering some rant about how comment spammers are making the blogger's life hell. I saw someone somewhere refer to spammers as the lowest form intelligence on the planet. Or should that be the highest form of stupidity?
It doesnt matter either way cos it seems these guys are essentially making what could have been a lucrative way of advertising go bad because they dont know where and when to stop.
My own personal example. Last week, whiles away in Nottingham, my website was supended my my hosting company suddenly and i had to send a few emails back and forth trying to figure out why i'd been suspended.
The worst i thought would be if somehow someone had gained access to my account and was using it to spam. That according to their policy means no second chances. No questions asked, your account is disabled.
So i was quite glad when i was told it had been turned off due to my account using too much processing power. Precisely "too many open connections to mySQL" databases.
They re-instated my account and gave me a log with a sublte warning saying to fix it before the 29th. Firt thing i thought of was some changes i made a coupla weeks back in other to combat comment spam.
What it tuned out to be? Well I had some hostees on my account a while back who've as at now moved to their own servers... thing is, i never got round to deleteing thier installation of Movable Type and spammers have been slowly adding comments over the best part of a year...
Then one spammer decides to send a comment every second. The point being? Makes no sense. They could've done one every hour over two weeks and would've had the same effect without anyone batting an eyelid. Well now obviously i fixed the problem and no more comments spam on that MT install.
Applying this same analogy to other people's blog. It looks like people dont care so much about one or two comment spam inserted into old posts.. they might even ignore it.
The problems start when people start getting more comment spam than real comments from readers. When they have to spend more time deleting comments than blogging. Some may take drastic steps like deleting their blog altogether. Disabling commnents for a while until a solution to stop the comment spam is also another option.
Comment spam is viral in nature... but it goes against a basic rule in being a virus. Dont kill your host cos you'll die too.
Comment spammers, go back to the drawing board. Back to the days of a spam comment a day and maybe we'll let you survive.
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