Spamalot

June 3, 2007 in Uncategorized

As much as I enjoy being told how I can enlarge various parts of my body for $19.99, that I’ve won the lottery in the Netherlands, and that a time share in Papua New Guinea is waiting for me, after spending today deleting many spam comments on 37days, I’ve decided that for the moment, I need to turn on the happy "moderate comments" function to reduce the number of spammy love notes, those wonderful offers of such grand and glorious proportion that I feel utterly inadequate to their very possibility.

And so, if you want to leave a comment on 37days, and I wish you would because I love getting mail particularly on those days when I’m feeling insignificant, this new approach won’t change how you do that – except that your comment will go through an elaborate (yet quick) screening process before being posted so we all won’t be sold little blue pills in ad infinitum.

Don’t worry – the screeners are quite nice (a Ph.D. candidate in nuclear physics, a police chief from a small Southern town, a poet who speaks solely in iambic pentameter, a lovely potter who specializes in horse hair raku, and a mailman from Liechtenstein or Wittgenstein, I can never remember which) and they are remarkably efficient unless they are fighting over semantics or whether Adriana will come back to life on the season finale of The Sopranos or the sheer meaning of life, so your comment will be winging its way onto the site before you can say "Billy Collins" or a similar four-syllable phrase of your own choosing.

About Patti Digh

Patti Digh is an author, speaker, and educator who builds learning communities and gets to the heart of difficult topics. Her work over the last three decades has focused on diversity, inclusion, social justice, and living and working mindfully. She has developed diversity strategies and educational programming for major nonprofit and corporate organizations and has been a featured speaker at many national and international conferences.

5 comments to " Spamalot "


patti digh

June 4, 2007 AT 7:48AM

just testing this newfangled comment process…

deirdre

June 4, 2007 AT 4:51PM

I got my first comment spam recently too. Took far too long to delete the suckers.I haven’t enabled comment moderation yet, but did put back the letters that must be typed in and matched. Let’s hope that’s enough. Beyond that, I do have to laugh at the garbage they try to sell. :)

AdriftAtSea

June 4, 2007 AT 6:31PM

Patti-

Unfortunately, there is a link between the anonymity of the internet and the fact that making spam doesn’t really incur any costs to the maker. Most of the laws have yet to catch up with the state-of-the-art in technology, so it isn’t really illegal yet.

Lisa

June 7, 2007 AT 7:33AM

Wow… you have a lot of people on staff just to weed out your SPAM. Happily, most of my email spam is filtered off by GMAIL, 99.9% accurately.

Blog spam… I normally don’t get with my haloscan comments. Every now and then, I’ll be solicited to visit a wierd website, but other than that..

I thought SPAM was supposed to be greatly reduced after the catching of that one idiot in Seattle.. No? :)

lucy archie

June 8, 2007 AT 9:55PM

Well, My favorite SPAM is the Society for the Preservation of Architectural Monuments
-lucy