Comment Spam Hits First Million Challenge

Well, I chose to trust the better nature of my visitors when I first started this blog and allowed comments to be posted without moderation. The reason is mainly because I believe some people will jump in joy over seeing their comments appear upon refresh, well… people like me. :) However, a month ago, random spam taking on the form of comments started invading this blog and I was forced to enable moderation. However, I’m not using any spam filters at this point of time. It’s still a manageable amount and I do not want the risk of actual comments to be classified as comment spam.

For actual humans, don’t worry about the moderation when posting comments. I approve almost all comments, even if you are all set out to condemn me, my blog and anything else I am in touch with. (Just try to use civilized language and keep this blog family-friendly) On a serious note, who will condemn me? I’m such a nice person, muahaha. Ok… not that serious after all.

I talk so much crap that I forgot how irritated I am with spammers. Besides abusing my comment boxes, spammers and their spambots have greater means to irritate me. For my websites, spambots fill in any form, from contact forms to forms for reporting invalid links and it’s really irritating. If any bloggers/webmasters have any good solutions to stop spam from hitting my blog and websites, please let me know.

I also got to mention the fact that my email inboxes contain hundreds of spam emails every single day. They don’t understand that I don’t need pills to boost my reproductive capabilities yet, I’m only 22 years old. I also don’t have any houses to mortgage, not intending to buy cars and plainly not interested in whatever spam I’m receiving. When will spammers start to become more advanced and send spam related to our interests? Maybe email users won’t be that upset over spam when that day comes.

Why now I help them out through an agreement with the spammers? I’ll tell them my interests and they can send me related emails, as long as they stop mailing me junk. It would be a win-win situation, I’ll see emails I’m interested in and the spammers might get some business from me. Apparently though, they are not interested in any form of negotiations and attempts to make peace will simply result in greater spam power bombarding your mail boxes. Spammers are only interested in coming up with software to hide their IP addresses, send emails faster and crawl for addresses. Customer Relations to them is a joke, since they are just interested in playing a numbers game. Maybe there’s an underground contest for spammers - the spammer who gets the most number of complains wins.

Anyway, the reason why I get so much spam is because for every website I have, spammers send emails to username@website.com, where username includes sales, info, admin, owner and any other creative users they can think of. All these spam goes into my root email account since I did not specify anything. There you go… one click of a button on the spammer’s side results in sending 20 completely same and useless emails to my inbox. Also… spammers have itchy fingers, so it’s not their style to press the send button only once, they like to press it a few times. Fortunately, I have a few spam filters in place and blackholes set up to throw away spam emails. If I don’t, I guess I will have at least 500 spam per day sent right to my inbox.

With that much said about spamming, I’ll end this post with a few coincidences. Firstly, it’s coincidental that my wife is working at Bugis today, just when I decided to go there. Secondly, it’s coincidental that I met a primary school classmate at Sim LIm Square today. Thirdly, it’s coincidental that Google started to update its cache of this blog after I blogged that it does not seem to be crawling my blog. Haha, I’m so long-winded and if you read this far, I really appreciate it. Thanks.