To (spam) hell and back

January 29, 2008

Yesterday I deleted 1632 spam comments on my blog and it felt great.

This process started last week: I saw that the number of spam comments I had received was pretty high, so i decided to go through each page of 50 comments with a fine toothed e-comb and weed out the non-spam comments. Usually when I do this I find exactly zero non-spam comments but this time I hit the gold mine.

Apparently some people have been leaving comments on my blog (Hi Cynthia! Hi Stephanie! Hi Catherine!) and these comments hadn’t seen the light of day. Well now they have and they’ll continue to do so.

By the time I reached page 7 of my spam comments, my dedication to ensuring that all legitimate comments get posted began to flag. Not only was it a time consuming process (especially since I only think of doing it when I’m at work), but I had 25 more pages of comments to go through, which was quite discouraging. So, I cheated a bit: I did searches for the names of people I thought might have been tempted to comment on my blog (selecting random yet common names) and then I deleted the rest of the spam comments, unseen.

I’m sorry. I was weak. If you left a comment and it never posted, please don’t hate me. I’m going to keep a better eye on my spam comments so next time I’ll be able to save your comments from the depths of hell before they fall too deep down. That is my promise to you.

Filed under: Blogging by jummy

5 Responses to “To (spam) hell and back”

  1. Jess, on January 29th, 2008 at 4:45 am Said:

    How do you get so many spam comments? Can you turn on word verification or something? I mean, that's just an insane number of comments!

  2. Josh, on January 29th, 2008 at 11:10 pm Said:

    Wow, wait a min. You mean, you have somewhere you get to screen comments before they pop up on this page?

    Sounds like some work that works! Little wonder your blog page looks crispy and clean! :-)

  3. Matt, on February 1st, 2008 at 1:45 am Said:

    wasnt me

  4. janet, on February 1st, 2008 at 6:36 am Said:

    I have the same problem! I always feel guilty when I lose things in spam but it's not very fun to sift through…..

  5. Virginia, on February 9th, 2008 at 5:05 pm Said:

    I hesitate to comment on this post since I'm doing it so long after the fact but…Are you using Akismet spam blocking on your wordpress blog? A few will still get through but the vast majority don't. Any that get through you can mark as spam so that the software "learns". If you need the details on where to get this plugin or how to make it work just email me.

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