slamboard

Most comment spammers don’t even try that hard to fool the smart people. This one does a stellar job of exploiting a common human foible known as vanity.

If there are any 8 year olds reading my blog, I would like to get in touch. I am going on vacation soon and it would be cool to have a guest blogger for a few days. I can’t pay much.

This disturbing bit of ‘information’ was left in a comment today. The link was to what appeared from the title to be a Malaysian blogspot splog.

I have managed to increase the traffic on this blog by a factor of ten over the past few months, thanks largely to one very big story. The amount of spam comments that I look at has increased infinitely. Now that the discussion of that particular story has, for the most part, left this particular arena I think I will install Akismet so I don’t have look through all the spam. This very effective spam filter rarely catches real people and I won’t be double checking.

I have already published a short post about the increase in reblogging. I delete trackbacks everyday that come from ‘blogs’ that are nothing but a collection of excerpts from real bloggers who are creating real content. Given the automated nature of this method of creating a website that appears to have relevant content to the search engine spiders, I can assume that they occasionally feed off each other. I have noticed in the past few days that the reblogs that are set up to have a little attribution blurb are attributing it to the wrong author. A post that I wrote discussing LAP BAND surgery was incorrectly attributed to CarbWire. This attribution is in the form of unlinked text. The rebloggers get to exist in a gray area of ethics and legality because they link to the original source. They do not add to the discussion in the blogosphere, they simply feed of it to gain ranking for their URL so they can be monetized.

I would like to express my gratitude for all the comments made on my blog in relation to the series on Kimkins. I am happy to say that I have been able to approve every relevant comment regardless of the opinion of the commentor. I just approved a very adamant defense of Kimmer that anyone following the story will want to check out. The new comment is on Part III.

I would also like to apologize if anyone did not have their comment approved. I am getting a deluge of spam and any comment that had several links may have been caught in the filter. The filter consists of my brain, eyes and right index finger.

I think I am thinking about freedom of speech this morning because I watched a clip on YouTube that feature Bill O’reilly reading profanity filled, negative comments from KOS to a guest from the Hillary Clinton campaign. It was a weird moment. I think a lot of people don’t understand that taking a stand against censorship means sucking it up when there is something in print that you don’t like. I don’t like any of the above mentioned people enough to link to them.

I just wanted to make a quick post inviting comments to any and all posts that I publish on Slamboard. I worry sometimes that requiring approval of the first post from new commentors dissuades people from having their say. I have left sites wide open before and they end up with thousands of spam comments.

If you look in the comment section of the post immediately before this one, you will see that I am willing to approve critical comments.