Tag: spam

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Spammers, fear Akismet’s wrath!

Man, when I fall off the wagon, I fall off hard. There are a few blog entries I could have written, but opted not to… maybe some other time, maybe not. But the point is that after writing something every day in November, I looked on here, noticed that it was getting close to a week since my last post and it hurt me deep down in my soul. Thankfully, there are always spammers trying to post comments that keep things interesting. For me, anyway.

Akismet is a spam blocker here on WordPress and from 2007 to now, it’s blocked 14,609 spam at a 99.65% accuracy rate. I remember back in the old days of shawnbakken.com, there were no spam blockers (at least none that I knew of), so I had to surf through all the posts and get rid of all the bogus comments myself. I currently have over 650 posts and Akismet blocked eight spam since I logged in yesterday… Akismet has saved me a lot of time and frustration over the last few years.

Today, seven of the blocked comments were from “vimax” or had “vimax” as part of the spammer’s web address. I have no idea what Vimax is and I’m afraid to look it up on Google in case it’s something like a herpes medication—if I found out and told you, you might start to wonder why I knew…

But I thought it was interesting because some of the comments were along the lines of “My wife wouldn’t like it if she read this.” I’m sure I’ve written an offensive blog post or two or… well, there could be a lot, but this one? “Hey, fuck your wife, I like having a social life!” But since Akismet blocked that comment, I didn’t have to write that response—since I didn’t have to tell the spammer to go fuck his wife, one could consider Akismet a cock blocker with a 100% success rate, too.

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Spam can be funny

Once in a while, I get a “comment” from an online poker site or someone who thinks my penis could use a little extra *oomph*, but thankfully, this version of my blog sends me notices every time someone leaves a comment, so it’s a lot easier to weed that stuff out. (Back in the old days when I had to look for it myself… I’ve got approximately 200 entries in here and 6000+ comments, so it would have taken a while…)

Naturally, the comments are annoying and I want to get rid of them ASAP, but this one was kinda funny for a couple reasons. For starters, it snuck through as non-spam because the “person” who sent it was “Faqs About Your Home Owners Man”. Here’s what Faqs wrote:

“Super site! I also agree with the last few statements. I am reading through here and noticed that several other people do to. So it is not just me”

Notice that spam has really crappy grammar. Notice also that “several other people” leave comments (lemme tell ya, it’s taken several of you to leave more than 6000…). And as a final notice, the comment was left on this post. Yes, that’s right, Faqs totally agrees with what I said about getting my wallet stolen.

Now, because the person took my ID with the money and my credit card, I put a flag on my credit report. (The guy probably threw the remains of my wallet in the trash, but why take a chance given the possibility that he’ll go on a shopping spree that involves more than gas and pizza?) That’s one of various reasons why I won’t be buying a home in the near future, so if Faqs agrees with something I wrote that’s gonna make me avoid him… I’m guessing that he doesn’t like his job very much. But he thinks the site is super. Spam can be funny…