Reservations for an Especially Hot Place in Hell
April 7, 2007
If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed or by Email.
Thanks for visiting!
As you may have noticed my posting frequency has dipped a bit recently. I’ve got a lot on my plate and am even busier than normal. I’m OK with that.
But there is something I’m not OK with. You might say I have a bone to pick, although my problem is boneless. I suppose you could say I’ve got a beef with the whole thing, but it is more of a pork-food by product thing.
What I’m struggling with is the incredible amount of time I have to fritter away every day to deal with spam.
OK so maybe it is not really all that much time that I’m wasting. The issue is that the time spent because of spam it totally wasted time that I can never get back. Just like those 86 minutes I spent watching Napoleon Dynamite or the 119 minutes I suffered through The Life Aquatic waiting for it to get funny (I mean common! Bill Murray and Owen Wilson should have been funny, right? What happened there?), every minute I spend dealing with spam is one that I can never get back.
Because machine spam filters are far from perfect and have a tendency to trap legitimate messages along with the junk, I’ve got to spend my precious time to sort through all the junk and let the good messages through. It doesn’t matter whether it is blog comments or email, the principle is about the same.
And the worst part about it is those spam minutes are entirely caused by other people, whether they do the spamming directly or set machines in motion to do their spamming for them. Ultimately spammers are people, plain and simple.
I don’t know what your philosophical/religious beliefs are about the existence of God are but I happen to believe that God exists. (If you don’t or are unsure and want to go through a thinking exercise, check out this article laying out a rational case for the logic of believing.)
And I also suspect He is not very happy with spammers. In fact, I’m asking God right here and now to reserve an especially hot place in Hell just for them. I know that’s not very charitable of me. But then I’m not a perfect person at this point in my journey.
According to the Wikipedia entry on Email Spam,
The most common items advertised in spam messages are: Pornography site subscriptions, prescription drugs, purported sexual enhancement products, printer ink cartridges, counterfeit brand name goods, counterfeit software, mortgage offers, fake diplomas from nonexistent or non-accredited universities, and pump and dump penny stocks.
I’d add to that list of things I neither need nor want - lottery winnings, a job laundering exchanging money for some shady Asian/Middle Easter personage, or to adjust an account I don’t own at the Fifth Third Bank.
I suppose I should be encouraged that spam seems to be affecting both sides of the war on terror equally. That is if the photographic evidence can be believed.
Perhaps the most nefarious spammers, the ones I would like to see get the very hottest of the spam rooms in Hell, will be those who play on religious convictions and try to guilt folks into sending them money.
Oh yes. Turn the thermostat up to a billion, please.
I guess the thing that really gets my goat is how incredibly inconsiderate spammers are. Because the whole thing is anonymous some see it OK to flood the precious bandwidth with crap.
Fortunately for us WordPress users Akismet does a pretty good job handling spam. Their live spam zeitgeist shows graphically that 95% of all comments made on the blogs they protect are spam. And according to this article in Information Week, the percentages for email is just about the same.
We really can’t win. The options seem to be to A). Leave yourself unprotected and get flooded with spam, or 2). Get an overzealous spam filter that captures a few legitimate messages along with the spam. Either way you end up doing a bunch of sorting, depending on how much communicating you do.
The bottom line is that no matter how much you dress it up, you can’t change it. Make a salad out of it if you want.
But at the end of the day it’s still spam.
Chris,
I just wanted to say this is a great post. I got a good laugh out of it, but I know it’s also a very serious (and horridly annoying) problem.
It’s also good to find someone else who thought Napoleon Dynamite was a complete waste of life. Maybe we’re not cool enough to get it. Or maybe a bunch of people are just on a crazy wavelength.
Have a great Easter,
Andrew
Hey Andrew! Glad you “got” the humorous/serious bent I intended for this.
Gotta say I personally give Napoleon Dynamite a whole lot more credit than The Life Aquatic. At least they did it on a much smaller budget!
Chris, very funny post on a real problem. I’m with Andrew and you on the Napoleon Dynamite issue. Probably a few more you could add to that list.
I found that Bad Behavior really helps with the spam issue. I went from 250 spam a day to maybe 1. As a result Akismet is on a well needed rest.
Chris - I haven’t seen The Life Aquatic. I just looked it up, and it does look like a pretty big waste of time. I’ll consider myself lucky for not having seen it.
Dave - I’m looking into Bad Behavior right now. Thanks a ton for pointing that out. I don’t know how I missed it to begin with.
[...] is one hot post on the spam [...]
Dave, I’ve heard really good things about Bad Behavior. I guess I’m a touch hesitant to punish those good readers out there who care enough to leave a comment by making them jump through extra hoops, however slight.
I know doing a little math problem is not a big deal. But the principle of punishing good folks because of the behavior of bad ones goes against my grain.
Therefore I choose to rely on Akismet to protect the blog and I choose to look through all the junk for the occasional false positive and let it out.
I hope that doesn’t make me sound like a martyr.
Andrew, we actually rented The Life Aquatic because my wife and I both think Bill Murray and Owen Wilson have been in some funny stuff. It was billed as a comedy and it was recommended to us by some friends of our who really enjoyed it.
We nearly turned it off three different times but powered through because we were sure it had to get funny eventually. If it did we missed it entirely. Oh, well.
Chris, the math question isn’t part of Bad Behavior. And now that you mention it, I’m going to take that challenge question off my site. Bad Behavior introduces some code that discourages spambot behavior.
Dave, It appears I’ve got to do some research about Bad Behavior. My ignorance is showing!
I’ll check it out. If it is as good as everyone seems to say it is, I may get just the help I’m looking for.
Now if I could just get my ISP email account up to snuff…
Hi Chris,
Simplest solution: obscurity! I know it sounds counterintuitive, but it works! I’ve got no problem with spam!
Mike
Mike, I’ve found that the longevity of a blog or number of readers does not really seem to have a correlation to the amount of spam a blog gets. My personal blog, that hardly anyone reads gets about 10 times the amount of spam this blog gets.
Ironically, my very next post about blog advertising is getting clobbered with spam trackbacks from a bunch of splogs on the netmoviehost.com domain. Go figure.
I blame the Moon Pie logo for your problems at CREEations! Or maybe it is the notion of spammers following advertising-related items figuring if someone’s spending money somewhere, there’s probably a tagalong benefit. Kind of like Wendy’s store location strategy back in the 70’s: just go where McDonald’s does.
On the splogger front I think they’ve got some system set up that searches key words and then scrapes a bit of content from post along with a trackback as a way to draw in traffic for their own AdSense ads.
From their perspective it is a [No Work + Ad Revenue = Good Idea] formula.
As for the Moon Pie logo, well, what can I say? I like the dang things.
[...] Over at SuccessCREEations, however, Chris Cree has a different take in Reservations for an Especially Hot Place in Hell. [...]
I too don’t understand what spammers get out of it, unless “losing one’s soul” has suddenly become an advantage. You never hear “Well, he made his fortune spamming people”. BTW,, that salad is one on the most disguisting things I’ve ever seen
I never thought about that, but it’s pretty funny, Sarakastic. Just imagine a cocktail hour exchange like
I bet that would never happen.