What the holy hell is going on with the spam all of a sudden? My spam filter has caught more than 700 spam comments since Friday, and I’ve deleted another dozen or more spam trackbacks. That’s about four times what it usually is. Seriously, I’m getting a little annoyed. And the vast majority of them have Greek names attached to them – go figure.
I wade through all of them, because the spam filter does occassionally snag a legitimate comment by mistake, but it’s getting to be an onerous task. I may have to look into some sort of comment validation, much as I hate those things. Sigh. The splogs are getting out of hand, too, but while I find it annoying to see that “Floyd wrote an interesting piece on (keyword): here’s an excerpt” followed by my content, I don’t have the heart or the inclination to follow up on each and every one of them. (I’m finding about three a week these days through the trackback spam.) Did I mention sigh?
Tristan has picked up one of my linguistic peccadilloes. On more than one a few occasions lately, he’s looked at something and said, “What the hell is that?” And each time I gently correct him and say that “hell” is not polite, and we should say, “What the heck is that?” instead. But “hell” is so low on my radar screen of curse words that I’m sure I say “What the hell” or, more likely, “what the bloody hell” about sixteen times a day without even realizing it.
For a truly delightful article on a son’s indoctrination to the wide world of curses, check out this piece from the UK Guardian a couple weeks back (hat tip to Andrea, where I first saw it.)
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{ 15 comments… read them below or add one }
I encourage you to have a look at Project Honeypot.
http://www.projecthoneypot.org/?rf=46826
They’re code is easy to install.
I can’t guarantee that it will immediately reduce your spam, but I believe it will help in the long run. At the very least, spammers will begin to avoid sites carrying the code. At the very best, they’ll start winning the lawsuits they’re filling against the spammers. And then we’d all win.
Goodness, that’s supposed to read “Their code is easy to install.)
hahaha that’s funny. Kids are actually kinda cute when they say “grown up” words.
My little sister picked up the word “damn” from my parents and would say things like “close the damn door!!!”
Ahh… what do you mean by ‘Greek’ names?
Loukia, these are just from the spam that’s arrived in the last four hours: Argyros, Thanasis, Christoforos, Grigoris, Lazaros, Hristos, Rhigas, Kostantinos, Loukas, Theophanis, Hermes, Maximos, Leonidas, Kosmas, Anastasios, Adamantios … and that’s not even all of them.
Lee, thanks, will check out Project Honeypot — thanks for the tip!
Hehe. That’s funny.
The other day I asked my son what he was doing up in his room and he said, “I was just screwing around.” ?? I honestly can not remember ever saying that. I tried my best not to laugh and told him that is not a nice thing to say.
Still I had a good laugh about it with my hubby later.
That story was great. So, who actually rates the curse words? Who determined that ‘cunt’ was worse than ‘fuck’? That’s what I want to know.
OMG really? That is soooo weird! Don’t hate us Greeks though! But I can imagine your frustration!
Man: You sit here, dear.
Wife: All right.
Man: Morning!
Waitress: Morning!
Man: Well, what’ve you got?
Waitress: Well, there’s egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam; spam bacon sausage and spam; spam egg spam spam bacon and spam; spam sausage spam spam bacon spam tomato and spam;
Vikings: Spam spam spam spam…
Waitress: …spam spam spam egg and spam; spam spam spam spam spam spam baked beans spam spam spam…
Vikings: Spam! Lovely spam! Lovely spam!
Waitress: …or Lobster Thermidor a Crevette with a mornay sauce served in a Provencale manner with shallots and aubergines garnished with truffle pate, brandy and with a fried egg on top and spam.
Wife: Have you got anything without spam?
Waitress: Well, there’s spam egg sausage and spam, that’s not got much spam in it.
Wife: I don’t want ANY spam!
Man: Why can’t she have egg bacon spam and sausage?
Wife: THAT’S got spam in it!
Man: Hasn’t got as much spam in it as spam egg sausage and spam, has it?
Vikings: Spam spam spam spam… (Crescendo through next few lines…)
Wife: Could you do the egg bacon spam and sausage without the spam then?
There’s much more, as you probably know, but *grin* you’re sick of spam now aren’t you? (I love Monty Python.)
How are you finding out about the sploggers? Is this one of those things we don’t find out about on Blogger?
I had a mad weekend of spam a little while ago, but it only targeted specific posts (all older ones), so I disabled comments on them and that put a stop to it.
Wordpress is good for catching spam, but I too have occasionally spotted ones that aren’t. Two were from regular visitors to my site.
It seems like spamming comes in waves too. There’s none for a while then all of a sudden wham!
Sarah says “frikkin’”. Loudly. As in “this frikkin’ shoe won’t stay done up!” I say friggin’, so I know where she got it, but the different pronounciation is hers and freaked my friend out when she heard it. I told my friend it could be worse…
(bad mommy)
B&P, it’s a combination of things. WordPress is much more efficient at keeping track of “pingbacks” when someone links to you, which is how I find out about most of them. My spam filter recognizes about half of those, and I manually delete the others. Plus, a few of them are bold enough to be on Technorati, so I can see the links from there. Every now and then I’ll also do a search on google to check for links (google “link:http://danigirl.ca/blog”) to see who is linking to me, and run my blog through the search engine at http://www.copyscape.com/?results. Only when I’m feeling particularly obsessive, though!
I’ve been having the same problem. I hate sploggers. I didn’t even know that word until I read your post, but I hated whatever-they-weres.
We’re having our own issues these days with “damn” and “pissed” or “piss”. The p word comes from school because we don’t use it at all. We’re probably guilty of damning everything all to heck though.