OT: A note on moderating a blog   4 comments

On any given day ~100 spam messages get posted to this thing.  Wordpress does a great job of dumping them straight to the Spam or the Pending Approval folders.  For the Pending Approval messages, I end up going through and looking at each one before deleting it at some point.  Some of them make me actually pause to try to figure out if it’s real – which is the whole point: get eyes on the link or product or whatever.  Here, then, is my advice to any of the readership who are looking in to careers as spammers:

  • Don’t be insulting.  A pretty frequent one is of the type “Your website needs work.”   I wonder where in advertising school they got the idea “be a total douche to strangers, they’ll totally buy your fake perfume!”
  • A lot of spam bots are content-sensitive.  I’ve seen it in other blogs, where the spambot uses keywords coupled with hit counts from Google to either fill in Mad Lib style sentences (“Thank you for your informative post on ______.  I will be back to check this frequently!”).  Why most of the spam on this blog is about Louis Vuitton knock-off purses and Ugg boots, I cannot fathom (though I do want to make a coffee table with Ugg-boot legs, like the elephant foot tables of Victorian salons).
  • If your content-sensitive spam bot cannot put together a coherent sentence, perhaps it should move along.  The esoteric nature of this blog means I get a lot of “Thank you for your informative post on. I will be back to check this frequently!”
  • Damn you, you sneaky motherfuckers whose spambots key off the right words and post C&Ps from About.com articles on Italian rapier.
  • If you are a real person, do NOT PUT AN UNCLEAR LINK IN YOUR USER INFO WHEN YOU POST!  Most of the spam advertising links are entered in the “website” field in the comment section.  When I see that, it is instant death for the comment.

 

HOWEVER: If you are a real person who would like to contribute to the Warfare, just let me know and you’ll get an account (Like Miriam d’Hawke is about to in 5… 4…)

Posted October 15, 2012 by Wistric in Musings

4 responses to OT: A note on moderating a blog

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