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 wonder if we’ve got engineers working on fly/maggot bots that break down plastics and such…wouldn’t that be great?
Thank you for the kind words regarding Luck. I just wish -was thinking about it for years- that I had had a camera to use for taking images of that sweet, innocent, vibrant face. She’s a tortie; not chimeraed, but still had a beautiful long orange streak down the center of her nose. She was such a dope! <3 Huge, golden eyes, her face always alert and youthful, quite poignantly pointed 🙂 lol!
Housefly maggots disgust me, een though they are practically used in treating infected wounds in humans. I do however have a fondness for Drosophila maggots, as I love their adult stage, and used to have so much fun in biology classes, breeding and studying their cute little feet and faces. 😉 In fact, still love to have them in the kitchen, flying above the overripe fruit that I forget to use.
They are being used again in some hospitals here, both university hospitals and other well-known research-heavy hospitals. What do you think? I think the use of maggots in these medical settings has cycles, surges, in practice. You mentioned WWI application. I can only imagine that they’ve been employed for millenia to treat infected wounds. lol. The smell is very difficult to take, but then, so are the putrification odors. ooh, enough said from this end. 😉
Yes, I was with her all night, soothing her with love words and nose nudges. It is so warm and embracing to know that she is still with me in spirit! I feel it so strongly, so even though it is heartwrenching, it is okay. She, like all of our cats, are with those of us who love our cats. The memories are wonderful, aren’t they? thank you, Ruth xxoo
That is a huge amount of spam trying to get through here, Michael.
Thank you for sparing us.
I’m certain that you are right, Caroline.
Many years ago, a homeless man was brought into our emergency room with a huge, deep, gaping wound in his groin area that was filled with maggots.
When the wound was washed and the maggots gone, it was the cleanest wound I had ever seen. Those maggots did a bang up job ridding it of debris.