You might have noticed that I haven’t had any posts in a while here. That was intentional, part of an experiment I ran involving the spam bots of the universe. Given that there were only a few posts and a very limited number of pointers to this location, the question I asked myself was how long before the problem of spammy comments raised its ugly snout (and how severe the problem would be).
I have let the site sit here with no activity for the last three months. Spam activity started slowly with an average of one spam comment per week in the late December to mid January time frame. Then the address was obviously sold/passed on to several spam targeting lists and the rate began to rise. Late January to early February saw the rate reach an average of 14 spam comments per week. The rise continued, flattening a bit in the last two weeks, attaining a steady state spam incidence rate somewhere around 30 spammy comments per week.
Isn’t it amazing that some machine or idiot is willing to devote all that time and effort to posting spam comments. (Let’s be frank here, these comments didn’t require any intelligence to detect that they were worthless spam.) I cannot picture anyone in their right mind clicking on the links contained therein. Proof positive that even a rate of one click per 100,000 views can generate money enough to drive traffic. How sad. Fortunately there are numerous spam comment filters that will remove them without me lifting a finger. I use Akismet, but there many others equally as good.
In any case, I am now ready to post more, but it may be slow due to issues I’ll go through in upcoming posts. Those of you who actually come visit the site will note that I changed theme and layout yet again – call it a result of it being more fun to play with the endless possibilities in WordPress than to type on a keyboard. (I may change it still more since I dislike left sidebars and glaring white space intensely. Do you have a favorite theme?) Also call it a side effect of moving to a later version of WordPress and wanting to spare some low bandwidth people the pain of detailed art downloads.
To entice your interest, let me leave you with this tip for free health care: