The spam filter for this site recently passed filtering out 50,000 spam comments.
I awoke this morning with 57 spam comments, one genuine comment, and one comment clearly spam which the filter had not dealt to. This site has had 732 blog posts with 3,072 comments. And so far 50,569 spam comments. The rate of spam is constantly increasing.
Spam comments vary from poorly constructed sentences with weak spelling which look like they are produced by a human whose English is very bad, being paid a pittance somewhere, to reasonably constructed, irrelevant material clearly produced by bots. A newer phenomenon is material created by bots which are combining pieces from another site (which I’ve recognised) and combining it with something in my post to produce something which looks close to coherent – but is in fact nonsense.
Some readers unfortunately will have produced a very good comment, but it has been filtered out by the spam filter. Sometimes I have time to examine comments filtered there and I can retrieve them. Often I just do not have the time and your good comment does not appear here. I am sorry.
I do not know if the amount I receive is inordinate. There was a site where the moderator regularly complained of the amount of spam and finally shut down the site claiming that the quantity of spam was caused by concerted attack by liberals of his more conservative position. Others see the deluge as a sign of satanic displeasure and hence that they are on the right path. I have no opinion whether this site is being conscientiously targeted either by Satan, liberals, conservatives, or fundamentalists 🙂
why do they call it spam anyway? is there a tale associated with this moniker?
Congratulations on reaching a milestone (I think…)
May you see 50 000 more.