Today I Am Giving Anonymous No Anti-Spam Advice

I thought it amusing that the above Anonymous blog comment made it past the spam filter to the Awaiting Moderation folder.

Amusing because the comment was a spammer asking me if I get a lot of spam responses and, if I do, what do I do to stop it or anything else I might advise as to how to stop this spam problem from driving the spammer mad.

Ironically,  in the past few months the amount of spam has greatly lessened. At its worst I was getting 100s of spam comments a day. Currently I'm only getting a couple dozen spam comments a day.

Below is the spammer's comment as it appeared in incoming email...

Anonymous has left a new comment on your post "The Tale Of Two Texas Historical Markers In Arlington": 

Hi, i read your blog from time to time and i own a similar one and i was just wondering if you get a lot of spam responses? If so how do you stop it, any plugin or anything you can advise?
I get so much lately it's driving me mad so any assistance is very much appreciated.

my web blog ... web page

The 'web page' part of the last line was a link to the spammer's website. Needless to say, I did not click on that link. Or include it in this blogging.

I Had To Resort To Word Captcha To Ward Off Incoming Russians

On the left you are looking at a screen capture of Outlook Express and just a few of the incoming emails. Email gets checked automatically every 15 minutes.

For the past couple weeks each batch of incoming emails been flooded with dozens upon dozens of spam emails.

Mostly Russian.

The source of this incoming email spam is the very blog you are looking at right now. When someone makes a blog comment Google sends me an email so I can moderate the comment.

Up til a couple weeks ago Google's Blogger spam comment filter has worked flawlessy. I don't recollect any time, previous to this current nightmare, where Google's Blogger stuck a spam in the 'Awaiting Moderation' folder.

Google's Blogger nuisance comment filter worked so well it even knew to stick the psychotic rantings of the sociopath known as Fubbo the Butt into the spam folder, sparing my sensitive eyes from being subjected to that particular psychotic sociopath's ranting.

My other blogs are getting hit by this new spam nuisance, but not nearly to the level this Durango Texas blog is getting hit with. Other Google Blogger blogs, which I help with, are also getting hit with spam comments showing up in the 'Awaiting Moderation' folder.

To put a stop to the current problem of spam flooding this blog's comments, this morning I enabled the annoying Word Captcha device. You see a screen cap of that below.

Google's Blogger's version of Word Captcha is particularly annoying. As you can see above, it is telling me to 'Type the two words'. Do you see two words? I don't.

Gar the Texan has long had the annoying Word Captcha thing enabled. It makes making a comment on his blog to be a bit of a pain. I suspect he intends this result, trying to cut down on the huge number of blog comments his musings generate.

Enabling this Word Captcha thing instantly fixed the spam flood problem. I'll give it a week and then get rid of the Word Captcha and hope the spam comments problem does not start up again.

I am not overly optimistic, but I am assuming Google is aware of the problem and is working to fix it.

Size Matters Not

I am currently being vexed by about 300 email spams a day. The trend seems to be more and more of it. I’m vexed because it is annoying, I’m vexed because it takes time to deal with it, I’m vexed because it has caused me to miss email I wanted to see, I’m vexed because I don’t understand the underlying economics of the spam and I’m vexed at what most of the spam is selling. I mean, what is the motive? Who is sending this stuff? And why? Do some fools actually click on the spam links and actually buy stuff?

About 10% of the spam deals with trying to repair my bad credit, trying to get me a new mortgage, trying to end my chronic obesity, trying to get me to update a bank record at a bank at which I have no account, or fix my Ebay or PayPal accounts.

The other 90% of the spam deals with (I insert a warning here, the following may not be suitable for young readers even though this is not Family Day, read the ‘Startlegram’ post to get the Family Day reference), as I was saying, the other 90% of the spam deals with concerns about my most private of parts. There is concern about its size, with endless offers of ways to end my embarrassment regarding my most delicate of shortcomings. And then there is also a lot of concern about how well my most private of parts performs, with multiple offers of multiple ways of amping up my most private part’s performance to top notch performance standards that will meet the most exacting needs of the most critical of critics and have those on the receiving end singing my praises and recommend me to their friends, neighbors and co-workers.

What further vexes me is no one else I know gets these offers. How did the annoying spammers discover I am in need of this help? Who told them? Was it you? Well, it needs to stop. I have learned to live with all my various shortcomings and all my various performance problems and I’m not going to grow any bigger or perform any better at my ripe old age so just drop these attempts to fix me.

Not that I don’t appreciate the concern.