I’ve been in tech since middle school (and I’m not young anymore), but I am still appalled at the amount of spam that is spewing around out there. My email has really good filters, so I don’t see any of it. But if I check the filter logs, there is a ton of it getting filtered, even though I have always been very careful who I give my email address to. For this blog, I run a standalone copy of WordPress and similarly there is a ton of spam submitted as comments to posts. In a recent 4 day period there were 175 spam comments submitted to this blog, and my blog isn’t even popular! I am so tired of being told about places to buy discount pharmaceuticals.
Thankfully, there is a wonderful plugin for WordPress that does a very excellent job of filtering spam. Otherwise I would have to moderate all the comments and continually delete the spam. The plugin is Akismet and it is included in WordPress. All you have to do is get a free user key and activate it. It is wonderfully accurate and wonderfully easy to use. A HUGE THANK YOU!!! to the folks that developed this and were willing to share it.
Until I set this blog up, I had no idea that spamming blogs was so pervasive, but I really shouldn’t be surprised. I call myself a Christian, but I have nothing kind to say about spammers. I’ll just leave it at that. The sad thing is, the spammers are probably making good money. Eventually the network may figure out how to block spam effectively at the source, but I’m afraid there will always be people who exploit in one way or another.
Please do your part: don’t let your machine become a bot. Keep it fully patched and stay away from untrustworthy software.