Ideal for singalongs at nursing homes, senior residences or just at your own home. Bound in a loose-leaf binder of durable vinyl, unsnaps for access to pages. (To see a photo of the book, click 
Riddled by spam
I’ve been playing a lot more music these days and not paying as much attention to this website as I probably should. Spammers, on the other hand, have been increasingly attentive to R&W Blog.
We’re getting buried by spam postings in our comments section — hundreds of them a day.
We have a good library of offerings in our Works section — nonfiction, fiction and poetry — and we plan to leave this website up on the Internet for anyone who’d like to read them. Of course, for a website to remain healthy, it must stay active.
During my recent weeks of relative inactivity, R&W Blog’s general health has been slipping — from a Technorati authority of 27 and rank of 305,000th in March to an authority of 9 and rank of 632,000th this month.
That’s still not horrible. Considering that Technorati tracks more than 5 million blogs, a rank of 632,000 still puts us in the top 13 percent.
I’d like to think R&W Blog still has some shine as it sits in this vast cybersphere, much of it wasteland. But like anything that glitters in the desert, not really abandoned but not often visited, it invites vandals.
We’re like a shiny tin can that attracts bullet holes.
Well, I’m getting pretty good at dealing with these spam comments by the hundreds. I do have to scroll through them — I wouldn’t want to miss a legitimate comment from a reader. But I have quickly learned that any comment containing multiple links — they show up on my machine in blue — is spam.
And some of these spam comments are so strange, they’re almost amusing. For example, bad translation into English gives us this offering from newsesystem.com:
Hello! Our company plans creation of essentially new search system! We spend interrogations 3 months. It is important to us to know what search system from existing now on the Internet most to you it is pleasant — google or msn or yahoo. And also that it is pleasant to you and that is not pleasant in these search systems.
(Notice how the words ‘that it’ and ‘that’ in the last sentence are a mistranslation of the word ‘what’?)
Another spammer offers a free loophole to get a gold membership at Adult Friend Finder, a site for “sex without commitment.” I wonder what the silver membership promises — sex with less commitment?
And really, spammers, if you’re going to claim to represent a legitimate business, try spelling it right — got that, Conney Island Pizza New York? And it’s hard to buy into any school that claims to be in western Pannsylvania, although this did purport to be a cooking school.
Another spam comment drew my attention to a ‘raw cooking school.’ What the hell is that?
Anyway, apart from stopping now and then at the loopy ones, I’ve developed a reasonably good speed at scrolling through all these spam comments. And our comments section has two buttons — ‘mark all as spam’ and ‘bulk moderate comments’ — that makes them quickly flushable.
So take your best shot, spammers. We like a little riddle now and then.
– Sid Leavitt
Posted in Uncategorized |
December 10, 2008 at 12:31 am
Every now and again, I’ll get a spam email that reads like dadaist poetry; some of them are quite beautiful in an unintentional sort of way. I used to keep a file of them on my desktop for future use, but after the Great Computer Crash of July 2008, I lost a lot of odds and ends I had preserved in digital ether.
December 10, 2008 at 1:12 pm
Yes, dadaism, that’s it. You’ve put your finger on it, Steve.
Maybe that’s why I tolerate scrolling through hundreds of these spam comments every day. While most of them are just ads for viagra or naked nurses, some of them have that flavor of anarchy and anti-art that, as irrational as they are, border on some kind of cosmic sense.
Your comment, by the way, was No. 19 of 112 comments that I found this morning in the first of three screenings that I usually do every day. What with the viagra, nurses and, of course, other Christmas gift ideas, we’ll easily top 300 comments today.
Thank goodness for yours. It was like finding a gold nugget in a garbage can. (A can, by the way, riddled with bullets.)
December 11, 2008 at 9:17 pm
Well, at least one of my “nuggets” is gold…I’m down with the stomach flu.
January 1, 2009 at 1:37 pm
happy new year sid!
January 6, 2009 at 10:22 pm
Thank you, May. So far, it’s been a good one. May it be the same for you.
February 6, 2009 at 10:43 pm
I got this today in my work email. Just absolutely perfect. Like a kind of spam haiku. I want to be the guy that writes these things.
“Your *****’ll be your trump - My ***** needs a bad comb-over? I guess it’s one solution to the incredible loss my circumcision has left me to feel. I’m only half a man.”
February 24, 2009 at 12:25 pm
Hee hee! Yes, spam can be hilarious. I’ve gotten a number of humor postings based on actual spam. Like I’d review “marital aids” on a mostly-family-friendly humor blog. Poop, yes. Adult toys, no.
Don’t sweat it on the Technorati ratings. I learned that they basically purge your ratings every 6 months. Any links to your blog over six months old aren’t counted by Technorati. One week I broke the top 100,000 blogs, only to plummet the next time I checked. I won’t type how far.
As for comments — and you’ve probably already thought about this but I’ll ask anyway — have you thought about making comments live only after you okay them? That’s what I do and get very little spam. I don’t have time to do it otherwise. I only wish Google’s Blogger system had a more user-friendly comment moderation system. Hear that, Google?
P.L. Frederick (Small & Big)
February 24, 2009 at 12:30 pm
Ooh, I just realized: you’re probably not using Google’s Blogger system for blogging. Still, my challenge to Google stands.
Hope you’re having an enjoyable day, Sidster!
P.L. Frederick (Small & Big)
March 2, 2009 at 2:31 pm
At least you know your words are reaching someone! I once heard a theory that the more spam you get, the more exposure your site has had with the webcrawlers and search engines. Kudos!