As of this morning, there have been 551 attempts to post spam on this blog just since February. To be honest, the Akismet plugin is one of the great arguments for using WordPress; it does an excellent job of screening out the junk. In that same time frame, it’s only stopped one message that should have gone through. I run 4 blogs at work. Three of them use WordPress; the other uses something else (I have no idea what). I have to go onto that blog several times a week and remove the spam comments.
Why does spam continue and even grow in popularity? Because someone, somewhere, clicks on those links. (I even wrote a Heartlight article about that) More than that, they buy the junk being peddled. When it comes down to it, it’s those people that bother me. Without them, there would be no spam. But there are enough people using the Internet, that the actions of that fraction of a percentage complicate life for all of us.
[I was a Monty Python fan as a teenager, so I remember the “Spam, spam, spam” skit from whence this annoyance gets its name.]
I love that aspect of WordPress too. I’ve never had problems with spam. My gmail account works the same way. I never had any spam sent there until one time I thought I might download some Christian music. But I made the mistake of finding a site through google that I didn’t know, and when I signed up for this site, so I could get Christian music, I started getting spam. And suddenly the site changed appearance and all sorts of secular music and it was hard to find the Christian music — yep, I’m a sucker!! Now I see about 300 spam emails every day, though fortunately they don’t come through to my inbox.
Tim, you talk about fasting one week, then show canned spam the next, how is a man supposed to fast? I love Spam, on my plate, not on mt computer :)
Yeah, I was torturing Don with the pictures of fried chicken last week.
Lisa, I once signed up for something and was getting spam within minutes. Makes you feel so stupid. (Me, not you :-)
Oh, don’t worry, it makes me feel stupid too. I was so proud of having my new gmail account, un-sullied by junk email (unlike my previous account), and then I went & screwed that all up.