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Comments limited to registered users
Jul. 11th, 2011 11:08 amI've enacted a small change to my journal, and it makes me a bit sad.
I had to limit posting to registered users only, so robots can no longer post here anonymously.
For ten years or so, I would occasionally get a post or two a year that was a "spam" comment of random words or phrases and a link to a site selling mexican pharmaceuticals. As long as this stayed infrequent, I suffered it, so that people could say things without having to be a member of livejournal, or to remain anonymous if that is what the poster preferred. I remove the posts as soon as they pop up, both to keep them from being a distraction (not all the comments here are "signal" comments, but as long as the "noise" comments are coming from actual PEOPLE, then that's fine!)
But recently, my livejournal has been plagued with these posts. Over the last few weeks, there have been at least three a day.
This corresponds with the re-posting of tweets from twitter, and I can only surmise that the hashtags and other twitter specific syntax, is drawing in the robots. I'll work on editing that stuff out, but for a little while, I'm going users-only so that we can perhaps get the robots looking elsewhere for something to do.
I read recently that you are more likely to win the powerball lottery than you are to follow the links to one of these places that are advertised via spamming methods and actually make a purchase. I also read that it only takes 1 hit out of 2 million or so spams to keep them in business. Even so I can't see it being a viable business option forever. At least I hope not.
I tend to be a sunny optimist who thinks that a successful business model is "Sell people things that they NEED and then they will buy it." Of course these spammers don't care about a legitimate business model, they only care about extending the life of a shady one as long as possible. It bums me out, not so much that it's spam, but that they are abusing syntax scripts and other turing ware. I feel like that Simpsons episode where Professor Frink tries to use a Joshua door in his autodialer to rescue it from Homer's phone dialing scam. I'm cynical about Artificial Intelligence already, I'd hate to think that all anyone will ever do with AI in the future is build ever more sophisticated honeypots to try and get me to buy some scam or other.
I had to limit posting to registered users only, so robots can no longer post here anonymously.
For ten years or so, I would occasionally get a post or two a year that was a "spam" comment of random words or phrases and a link to a site selling mexican pharmaceuticals. As long as this stayed infrequent, I suffered it, so that people could say things without having to be a member of livejournal, or to remain anonymous if that is what the poster preferred. I remove the posts as soon as they pop up, both to keep them from being a distraction (not all the comments here are "signal" comments, but as long as the "noise" comments are coming from actual PEOPLE, then that's fine!)
But recently, my livejournal has been plagued with these posts. Over the last few weeks, there have been at least three a day.
This corresponds with the re-posting of tweets from twitter, and I can only surmise that the hashtags and other twitter specific syntax, is drawing in the robots. I'll work on editing that stuff out, but for a little while, I'm going users-only so that we can perhaps get the robots looking elsewhere for something to do.
I read recently that you are more likely to win the powerball lottery than you are to follow the links to one of these places that are advertised via spamming methods and actually make a purchase. I also read that it only takes 1 hit out of 2 million or so spams to keep them in business. Even so I can't see it being a viable business option forever. At least I hope not.
I tend to be a sunny optimist who thinks that a successful business model is "Sell people things that they NEED and then they will buy it." Of course these spammers don't care about a legitimate business model, they only care about extending the life of a shady one as long as possible. It bums me out, not so much that it's spam, but that they are abusing syntax scripts and other turing ware. I feel like that Simpsons episode where Professor Frink tries to use a Joshua door in his autodialer to rescue it from Homer's phone dialing scam. I'm cynical about Artificial Intelligence already, I'd hate to think that all anyone will ever do with AI in the future is build ever more sophisticated honeypots to try and get me to buy some scam or other.
