Missing Link

It’s no secret – I love technology. For the most part, I’ve quite enjoyed the dawn of social media and it’s impact on the Internet.

First, there was blogging. I love blogging – even if nobody reads what I have to write.  Then came Myspace/Facebook – while I have a facebook account, I *rarely* log in.  Then there’s Flickr for photo sharing (I use regularly), Twitter – for…. twittering, etc.

And there is one thing that binds them all….. Spambots.

My first experience with spambots – outside of receiving annoying spam email – was with my first blog, which ran on a MovableType platform. At the time there wasn’t any good way to combat comment spam because it was a new problem.  I ended up having to disable comments for a good period of time.

Then, services like Myspace became a haven for fake accounts with avatars of semi naked women saying they think you’re cute and want to be friends. It was a phenomenon that made the service worse than useless – it became annoying.

Facebook has – to my knowledge – not fallen prey to that. It’s annoying for different reasons. (I’m sorry – just because you went to high school with me doesn’t make us long lost friends. In fact, I’m pretty sure you tried to shove me in lockers or something.).

Twitter is fast becoming annoying because of it’s growing spambot problem.  I get followed on twitter by half a dozen spambots a week (or so it seems).  Thankfully, the way the service works I don’t have to follow them back, and in fact I don’t really give a damn if they follow me. It *is* annoying, but a minor annoyance.

The other day I got my first bit of Flickr spam in the form of a comment on one of my photos from a very obvious spambot.

All these spam bots are doing, is making it annoying for me to use these services. They aren’t convincing me to click their links (though I suspect they do entice some of the less intelligent of us).

Since I started using WordPress, the Askimet spam filtering for comments has caught over 35,000 spammed comments. I am not a well known site. I am not a big target.  I can’t imagine how many spam comments some better known sites would be dealing with.

Spam – even the kind that comes in the form of pre-processed meat in a can – is just not cool.

So – to you spammers out there…….. knock it the hell off!