According to Akismet, 89% of all comments are spam.
For some peculiar reason, 90% of the spam I get shows up as comments on a single post — my ancient Wikipedia and Nupedia. (Ancient is ambiguous; although the permalink is from 2001, this blog didn’t exist before January 2008, when I dumped several items from my old site into this blog, just to get started.)
The typical spam on Isotropic is usually related to insurance, drugs, or mortgages, and consists of many random words or phrases interspersed with links. It’s depressing to think that this automated spewing actually results in “success” for the spammers. Fortunately, tools like Akismet prevent most of this trash from actually reaching any viewers or search engines.
My mail client of choice is the excellent Claws Mail (formerly Sylpheed-Claws), it is feature rich and supports many plugins, including Bogofilter and SpamAssassin. I’ve found that the Bayesian filtering of Bogofilter works fine for me, so I’ve not had to add additional spam filtering.
I hope there is a special corner of hell reserved for spammers, where they have to listen continually to each other’s Tourette-like yammering, their eyes are seared by seisure-inducing flickering of random images, and their flesh is pierced and flayed by metal spikes representing each and every link they’ve ever embedded in emails or comments.
And next door … a place for every idiot who has encouraged spammers by responding to them.
Update (2008-05-29): Duh, I disabled comments pings/trackbacks on the W&N post; wonder what will happen now?
