OK, fine. I’m throwing in the towel, at least temporarily. The manual spammers have won this battle, hopefully they won’t win the war too.
In the last week, I’ve gotten about 100 manual comment spam posts. These are blog comments that are posted by a real person, probably overseas working for a tiny amount of money, that aren’t “spam” in the traditional sense. They actually read the entry then write some sort of quasi-related comment in the hope that you will think it’s a real comment and not delete it. Since they can include a URL as part of their personal info, this helps drive up their Google Juice. When they start applying this practice to the very entry where I called their ethics and morals into question, there’s no hope.
Of course it’s still spam. In fact, it’s actually worse than traditional spam since it’s not as easy to ignore. This means the overall value of the blog conversation is severely hampered.
I suppose we can score one for globalization, but this practice is a significant dark moment for blogging.
Hopefully turning off comments will help them lose interest in this site and I can turn comments back on soon. Here’s hoping….
