I don’t get a lot of traffic on this blog, but I get enough that I’m not embarrassed by the numbers on a month-to-month basis. Regardless of my readership numbers I’ve always struggled with the best mechanism for managing comments. I have tried a few things ranging from “wide open free for all” to “must sign in with an account” before finally settling on Blogger’s built-in “word verification”. It held up fairly well until one fateful day in May when I published a post about my encounter with Chuck Wendig.

Since the Wendig post my blog comments have been inundated with spam from all directions. Maybe inundated is too strong a word, but it’s definitely a noticeable increase. The good news is the comments don’t make it through to the website, so at least Blogger’s algorithm recognizes that they don’t belong, but the thing is I don’t get a lot of comments (see previous mention of traffic) so I have email notifications set up to send them to me when they come in, which unfortunately includes the spam comments as well.

Don’t get the idea that I think this is really that big of a deal, it’s not, but I do find it interesting for a couple of reasons and it poses a couple of questions, the first of which is “What was it about the Chuck Wendig post that brought on the spam bots?” I’ve posted many things that were more widely read and/or controversial and it hasn’t received this much attention. Maybe it was just a timing issue and would have happened regardless of what I posted? Who knows.

All I can say is that it’s all a little disappointing. Not that my spam to actual comments ratio is terrible but rather that the spam itself is terrible. Quite frankly, if I’m going to get spam I’d at least prefer if it was interesting. Here’s a sampling:

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• Your mode of describing the whole thing in this piece of writing is genuinely good, all be capable of without difficulty be aware of it, Thanks a lot.
• Hello Dear, are you actually visiting this web page on a regular basis, if so then you will definitely take fastidious experience.
• Fine way of explaining, and nice post to obtain facts about my presentation subject matter, which i am going to deliver in institution of higher education.