If you can read this, it means that Round 3 of my fight with my ISP is over and my ADSL is back up, which is a good thing because it means that I can tell you about why my ClustrMaps image has so many red dots on it suddenly…
Every so often I found that some random junk would show up in comments to my blog posts. When I saw it I’d just delete it, and it didn’t occur often so I didn’t really think much of it.
This was until I spied a comment that I actually needed to reply to, and found I couldn’t. I started looking at why the record number of the comment was so high, and found that my blog of little-more than 100 entries had become home to over 13000 items of blog-spam. 😦
I blame myself, obviously, as the software I use had introduced spam-filtering techniques a couple of versions ago and I hadn’t kept up.
In cleaning up the garbage, behind the red mist of rage I saw at having my blog being violated so, I noted something interesting. The issue had been going on for some time, and I realised that in front of me, in my humble little blog, I had a snapshot of the evolution of blog-spam.
The early stuff was primitive, and easily identified by querying for the names of erectile dysfunction drugs and other medications. The later stuff was harder and harder to detect until I was virtually picking it record-by-record out of the database. Some of it made absolutely no point to me at all: strings of random alphabetics with not even a URL in sight; maybe this was a worm just looking for the kudos of a DOS.
The thought occurred to me that perhaps I should have kept it, in much the same way as someone I know keeps copies of PC viruses and worms in a little (hopefully isolated) folder. Then I realised two things:
* Preserving something, or putting it in a museum, gives it some legitimacy. I don’t want to legitimise blog-spam; and
* The art (if any) in blog-spam is in the code that generates it, not in the crap it leaves behind.
As for all the hits on my ClustrMap, I figure 80% are the spambots infecting the blog and about 19% are the poor folk that got drawn to my site as a result of the spam. I had been thinking of a different blog platform, perhaps this episode shows that I need something a little harder.
Of course another way to fight blog-spam is to get your network disconnected from the ‘Net, and my ever-so-unfriendly ISP went out of their way to do that for me this weekend. Unsolicited, of course, which is even better. On a Friday afternoon, too — better still, as if you do actually manage to get someone on the phone it’s too late for them to find anyone who can do anything about it (apparently).
Recommendations of a good ADSL ISP accepted: although keep it to yourself if your ISP’s called wwkjukhkkjlpuggh or qjkdfsdfaksjkulkfhg… 🙂
Crossed Wires 