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.
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.
I have a feeling that a lot of spammers live in Asia. I don’t know why that’s my gut feeling. They only get paid peanuts but peanuts in numbers can keep a person alive in Asia.
You get used to it as a person who runs a website and you can tell immediately when a comment is a spam comment. They are all the same sort of comment: very bland, irrelevant, stupid, often bad wording and bad grammar with the inevitable link. Sometimes, quite often actually, the spammer praises your website and says how wonderful you are in the hope that you will allow their spammy comment. Don’t worry though because it isn’t really a problem any more as it is controllable
No problem, Ruth. I try and keep the admin side of things to a minimum and rely on software to help me through the day-to-day tasks. I think it’s just typical of the Internet these days that websites have to put up with spammers and trolls. I think you will find that the reason why quite a few websites do not allow comments is because of the people I’m referring to. There are an awful lot of bad people out there if one is honest.
I know that scientifically, they do not eat living tissue. And when applied within a controlled environment, they behave awesomely, performing just exceedingly well.
She was not parasitized by maggots, if that helps. She died. I knew that she was close. just not that close, to passing away. I do believe, though, that she is part of me. That lasts forever.
Du hast keine idee? It doesn’t matter that she was twenty or so. She was still my little one. She never asked for much. <3 Marc, thanks for acknowledging her here. I am still talking and seeing her when I go from room to room.