Spam! by grumbler %_|
Spam.
Ingredients: Ham, pork, sugar, salt, water, potato starch, and sodium nitrate (to keep its color).
Delicious.
Yet what was once a hearty start to my boy scout troop’s mornings has become a major annoyance to web communities across the Internet. And no, we’re not talking about canned meat here.
We’re talking about electronic spam - evil comments left by programs intended to flood the Internet with nonsense, links to viruses and oftentimes, free marketing.
Email spam, forum spam, message boards spam, chat room spam, spam and eggs, spam bacon spam and eggs… you get the point.
So in poking around the administrative end of our Web site and searching for something to write about this morning, I deleted almost 50 spam comments left since last week. The platform we use for crunchberry.org is Wordpress - blogging software offered by Automattic. With over five million Wordpress blogs, there are ample opportunities to spam. To mitigate this, we use Askimet, a plugin offered by Automattic for our blog.
By using this spam filter, comments like “uteijh3bibw36g2q” from our friend Jeanne Dominguez @ dctru.com on one of our recent posts are avoided. As interesting and insightful as her opinions are, I don’t think many people would understand what she is talking about.
Anyway, clearing out our cache of spam led me to ask one of our developers, Brian Boyer, about the integration of a spam filter for our commenting structures. Mostly because time is of the essence, we will not be looking into a spam filter. Also, a programmer would have to spend some serious time learning about the intricacies of our commenting system to formulate a spamming program. And because it isn’t widely used, it would more or less be pointless.
So while we will look into safeguards such as captcha, a spam filter will likely be in the recommendations section of our final report so we can make the most of our time.
Carpe diem!
