Vigilant, Fastidious & Diligent

I've been getting a lot of Spam lately (Spam as in junk mail not Spam® as in the canned precooked meat product). I've always received a certain amount of spam comments on BLMA but until recently this was a handful each week and easily eradicated. All part of the rich tapestry of the Internet, filtered by Blogger and easily eradicated without it ever reaching the eyes of my readers. But just before Christmas the volume of Spam received on BLMA jumped and has now reached annoying levels. 

Spam Comments are an everyday occurrence for most bloggers and (in my experience) are largely from that ubiquitous Internet user 'Mr Anonymous'. Some are comedy gold having clearly been written by a computer and then translated from Chinese or Russian into a bizarre version of English that has to be read to be believed. But no matter how funny some of these are they all have a sting in the tail, a link that isn't what it appears.

Most of the Spam I have had recently seems to be associated with Internet Gambling sites rather than porn, but very few of the spam comments are honest in their statements. None say "Visit my roulette website here..." and the only real intention of this unsolicited mail is to improved the page ranking of their website by scattering the Internet with back-links. Blogger automatically applies the "nofollow" tag to all comments, so back-links receive no Page Rank boost, but of course that doesn't stop the spam-bot from dumping in your comments folder in the first place. 

A wealth of words! 

My Spam is still largely being filtered and deleted before it reaches the public pages of BLMA but the volume of Spam has increased enormously over the last two months. I now regularly receive a couple of dozen Spam Comments per day and although for the most part it is still being caught by the filters built into Blogger its taking longer every day to eradicate. Despite this I'm not about to activate further security measures just yet. My views on Captchas are well known and I would only resort to these if large amounts of spam were getting past the filter's to the front pages. 

I'll remain "vigilant, fastidious & diligent" and will of course continue hitting the delete button as long as the spam-bots pursue their pointless business of clogging up the Internet with cr*p. But just in case I accidentally delete a genuine comment (thankfully this has only happened a couple of times) please bare with me and re-send your thoughts in. I still value genuine feedback and the vast majority of the conversations that take place on BLMA are conducted by living, breathing gamers with something worthwhile to contribute.