It never ceases to amaze me the amount of effort that is put into spamming, when the results are so statistically low. Every day we get hundreds of poorly crafted comments to this blog posted by bots in the hopes of having a web link appear. It’s SEO (Search Engine Optimization) spam that’s done in hopes of raising ranking on Google and the like. Google, for the most part, ignores this stuff, so the people doing it are a pretty ignorant lot. As are most spammers. After all, if they had some brains, they’d be making more money with less work, and not defecating where they live.

Today we found a much darker form of comment spam. It is malicious. It is a list of obscene words, links to child pornography sites, and the like that would trash the Google and other online reputations if it appeared on the site.

That’s the price of publishing a blog. If you want to maintain any kind of reputation, you have to manually moderate all comments. You can’t simply block IPs because there are zillions of spammers, and not all in the third world. We have logged hundreds in Los Angeles, for example. And so, spammers create jobs for comment moderators. There’s a duality operative here. For each badness of the spammers, a relative goodness manifests to counter it. Cat and mouse. Good cop, bad cop. White hat, black hat. Oh the wonder of the human race! Makes you wonder…