Internet Spam And Trolls: Some Thoughts

Spammers and trolls are the two nasties of the Internet. It might interest visitors to this site to know that I use software to prevent the comments from spammers being published. These comments are held in a certain area of the site where I delete them before they are seen by the public.

Spamming, by the way, is placing a comment on a site like this one with the intention of publicizing and promoting a product or website that sells products. The spammers do this by making a silly comment which says nothing while adding a link or lots of links to webpages where you can buy these products which are often very poor products.

spammers and trollers
Spammers and trollers — stats for spammers on PoC

It also might interest visitors that in the period of about two years that this website has been powered by WordPress there has been 547,000 spam comments. An extraordinary number. Every one of them except for about 1000 were blocked by a WordPress plug-in called Akismet. It is the most important plug-in for WordPress on the Internet, without question.

This plug-in is able to recognise a spam comment by the way it is configured. I can understand that because I can recognise spam comments that this plug-in has failed to pick up. There is no doubt that there is a certain configuration to them. Not only are there links inside the comment but the wording is bland and irrelevant, the paragraph breaks are inaccurate due to formatting problems, and the English is often broken indicating that it is a non-English speaking person who is writing the comment. A lot of the spam comments come from Third World countries in my opinion.

As you can see, the amount of spam comments greatly exceed the number of genuine comments. There are about 30 times the number of spam comments than there are genuine comments. But for this excellent plug-in I would be a great burden to run this site because it would be almost impossible to filter through all the spam comments and delete them everyday.

I think the number of spam comments says something about people and their behaviour today. There are a lot of pain-in-the-backside people messing around with the lives of other people. These people have no idea about being responsible for their actions. They have sociopathic tendencies in my opinion. Talking about sociopaths…

I have a theory about people who like to troll on the Internet. I believe that they sufferer from a heavy dose of self-loathing. Because they hate themselves so much they feel that they need to be hated in order for their lives to be in balance. In order to be hated they write comments which make people hate them. The troll suffers from very low self-esteem. You could argue that the troll is to a certain extent mentally ill and needs treatment. Personally I would just hit a troll if I met one! I hate them that much.

32 thoughts on “Internet Spam And Trolls: Some Thoughts”

  1. Ruth, hope you get this…what you said is so. Lately, I stretch my arms up high in the dark, after looking for her in her favorite spot. I stretch my arms up to the heavens! and if I have to do this for the rest of my life, so be it! xxoo

  2. Yes memories are wonderful, once the first pain of grief has passed you can think of the happy times, you can never get over the loss just learn to live with it and I’m sure Lucky had a wonderful life with you.
    xx

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