Month: October 2015

OTR Links 10/02/2015


Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Response to Spammers


This is a post that I enjoy writing every now and again.  It’s silly, I know, but fun all the same.

Why today?

I responded to a couple of blog posts yesterday.  Those blogs handled commenting differently.  One required interpreting a Captcha.  I hate those things.  I understand the concept is to stop a nasty person from reading the Captcha and then spamming.  It still doesn’t make it fun for the end user, me, though.  On the other blog, the reply had to be approved by the owner before the world could see it.  That certainly takes the chance that any spammer would get through a mechanism and you could only approve those that you agree with too!  Of course, I’m an agreeable person, so it was approved at some point.

Anyway, based on those, I thought that I’d take a look at my own routine.  I let Akismet handle spam responses for me.  I can’t recall the last time a spam comment got through and I basically don’t have to do anything.  That’s my blogging win-win.

Wow, I can’t imagine hand approving ~450K comments.

But the ones that are caught and are sitting in the cue are worth at least a comment on my part.

I should never have written that article for Jisc.  Now I’m confused with writing something for AOL.  Hmmm.  I would say that the chance this is an opportunity for me is a very low percentage.

I think someone’s advertising feed barfed into my blog.

How thoughtful.  I usually have breakfast while watching the morning news and then have my second cup of coffee here in the lab at the keyboard.  Regardless, I’m pretty sure that nobody really cares.

Those are rules to live your life by.  It’s a fine difference, however, between a clutter [sic] and a tidy environment.  I tend to err on the side of clutter, just this side of hoarder.

Busted!  I just spoof the dougpete.wordpress.com address above to fool people!

Well, it didn’t take too long to get bored of doing this.  It’s interesting to see how the responses are to posts from all over the place, time wise.  The first one above goes back to 2008 when I wrote a post about the Prime Minister debate, the US Presidential debate, and a playoff baseball game all being broadcast at the same time.  I’ll always remember that post as it was linked to an article from the Christian Science Monitor where I was called “snooty”.  How did a spammer ever find that?

Obviously, the reasons for keeping comments clean are for safety.  Most of them tend to have links that will take you to dodgy internet sites.  So, whether you use Captcha, personally approve, or use Akismet, it’s nice to know that responsibility is there from bloggers and a way to keep our browsing safe.

OTR Links 10/01/2015


Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.