Every morning I go through the same routine. I wake up…take the dogs out…open the laptop…and then proceed to spend the next 10 minutes of my life clearing out all of the spam in my email, comments and Twitter accounts that has mysteriously found its way into my Internet life while I was asleep. It is getting ridiculous how much of our lives now are consumed with worthless tidbits of text that we really don’t want. It is getting to the point that we are having to take drastic measures that take away from the overall user experience of the web…and that is sad.
Recently, John Chow illustrated how spam Twitter users are able to make you auto-follow them…Darren at Problogger disabled comments on his blog older than 90 days and many other internet and blogging junkies are having to take steps in order to reduce their anti-spam minutes during the day. When is someone going to step up and come out with a script, program or something that seriously combats the issue of spam? It just makes it that much harder for quality content to get in front of the eyes of people who actually want to read it when 7 out of 10 of your emails are spam related. Don’t you want to help that guy out in Africa that wants to move his money to the US? Or do you really want to put your Twitter account on autopilot and gain 100 followers a day??!!
Yes, you can get rid of some of this annoyance through the use of Akismet and your .htaccess file for blogging. Unfortunately, there still no real solution for email and Twitter and Twitter is becoming the newest jet set hangout for spammers in their quest to saturate the world with meaningless crap.
When does it stop? When do we all stand up and not take it anymore? Just when we think we have figured out a way to fight the spam issue, they figure out a way to get around it. If we really want the web to be all it can be…spamming has to be minimized more than it is currently. I do not want Twitter and other social media outlets to go by the wayside just because spammers want to get their .01% conversion.
I am sick and tired of spending my time deleting messages on my cycling and blogging blogs about nude pictures and debt consolidation.
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The thing that really bothers me about spam now is that I’m losing messages that I want to read. Innocent emails and comments on my blog are ending up in the spam folder now.
AMEN! to you Rob and Mike too. I don’t have the time to waste on spam comments and checking websites to know which comments in my spam folder may actually be a valid reader of my blog.
Today I also had to unfollow someone because she changed her avatar. I tweeted her a couple days ago and told her they may fe fine but I didn;t want to see her holing her breasts on every tweet. She left the new avatar so I have dropped her.
Being involved in the security industry, SPAM is a money market for both the offenders and the defenders. A common practice seen on many blogs and web sites is to use the name@domain dot com format to list an email address. This does not work and usually insults the intelligence of the spammer. They have scripts to reformat these pitiful attempts at email address fuzzing. Products manufacturers like Barracuda market their products as SPAM stoppers, but they really don’t reduce the amount of traffic which is the main underlying problem. SPAM experts are really intelligent people, but unfortunately have their priorities out of order. It would be interesting if IANA and core router controllers blocked off Russia for one day to see how much SPAM traffic dropped.