Digital Immigrant

I”ve been wondering why comment spam is such an everyday occurence. And I’ve been thinking about it even more after reading about the broken windows theory.

The theory goes that people feel lax when they know or suspect no-one is around to monitor their behaviour. I’ve experienced it myself, too. Some months ago I was trying to find parking for my scooter in de Waterkant. This shouldn’t be difficult but de Waterkant is a unique area — few streets are level. So I see a level enough spot and I see that someone else — a fellow scooter owner — had parked there already. So if they can park there, surely I can park there, right?

It was not to be. The store assistant saw me parking there and asked me to move. She was pleasant about it so I obliged.

So here’s the thing: I would’ve found somewhere else to park if I hadn’t seen that scooter parked there. Genuine. But the scooter’s presence gave me the excuse to park in front of a shop window.

The same thing goes for blog spam, litter, crime, etc. It’s more difficult to litter when the area is neat. Or rather, I suspect the majority of people wouldn’t litter when the area is neat but a minority will always litter, no matter what the area looks like. And a minority of internet users will always post spammy blog comments, no matter how well the owner protects the blog.

So when I open my blog’s spam folder, I feel compelled to google those comments. And sometimes I’ll find many, many, many results.

This phrase yields 118 results: “I will bookmark your blog and have my children check up here frequency.” And this phrase yields 58 200 results: “I will directly grab your rss feed to stay informed of any updates.”

I can’t write to all 52 800 blog owners but I can try to let some of them know that they’ve allowed spam to infiltrate their blog. And if each of them contacts just a few of the others, we can try to keep our blogs free of SEO consters.

This blog post is a perfect example of what I mean: “I’ll be speechless” It has 80 spam comments. The scary thing is that I’ve seen worse than that.

I once wrote to a blog owner to alert them that their blog has been infested with spammy comments. They wrote back to say thanks and then added that they were just so grateful for any and all comments. So they don’t particularly mind hosting spam comments.

I’d rather have 0 comments than 80 spam comments that promote Viagra, cheap cars online, and arabic boys names.

Get free updates to my blog with my RSS feed and follow me on Twitter. Leave a comment below to get involved in the conversation.