Spam Again …

BRIC Spam
Creative Commons License photo credit: Gauravonomics

For some strange reason, I had a few spam-free days when I moved my blog from a subdirectory to the main directory of my Web site. In the previous two years, Akismet had caught 97,000+ spam comments. Then for a day or two i had zero spam comments!

Then the spam started coming again—a trickle, a stream, a river, a flood. Now, a month later, Akismet has caught 10,000+ spam comments. 10,000 in one month! During the same time, I’ve had about 500 legitimate comments—20 spam comments for every real comment.

The bulk of the spam can be classified as porn, pills, and plagiarism

Porn: Ads about perverted sex are wasted on a person who openly expresses her Christian faith and values on the blog.

Pills: If the pill purveyors only knew of the adverse reactions I’ve had from prescription medicine they’re trying to sell without prescriptions, they would know there’s nothing for them here.

Plagiarism: Perhaps the thing that amazes me the most are those spammers who plagiarize earlier comments—or even my post! At first, these were hard to catch because they showed up on old posts with lots of comments. But now I’m getting comments that repeat a sentence from my post within minutes of posting.

Thank heavens for Akismet. I’ve been checking comments in spam to look for legitimate comments. A few of my regular commenters end up in spam—I don’t know why, but I try to catch them. But skimming through hundreds of spam comments each day is time-consuming and very unpleasant, and I may stop doing it. If your comment doesn’t appear, e-mail me and I’ll look for it. Otherwise, I may miss it.

Can anyone explain to me why in the world spammers spam?

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