The Joys of Blogging

There are days – and, sometimes, whole weeks – when the bad guys, the hateful, obnoxious, foul, nasty, malicious miscreants of the web tempt a Crabby Old Lady to throw in the blogging towel.

It’s bad enough the number of splogs that steal Crabby’s stories, post them as original and throw in a hundred Google Ads. It’s almost impossible to find the names of hosts to report them and Crabby resents that the ISPs, hosts and Google don’t police those sites themselves, leaving it to bloggers fight an invisible enemy.

But it’s an uptick in comment spam that’s giving Crabby Old Lady fits the past couple of weeks. It’s easy to delete the spam from people who sign themselves xieytfjeiswp. Even it if were the screen name of a real person with something worthwhile to say, Crabby isn’t interested if they can’t create a better pseudonym. And of course, that’s never the fact of the matter. These are always spam, their unpronounceable names linking, inevitably, to porn sites.

In a recent twist, people with real-looking names copy a paragraph from a comment above theirs, but their name still links to porn or, occasionally, a retail site. Crabby deletes three or four of these every morning and several more during the day.

Lately, however, Crabby’s vitriol is aimed at the ones who think she is dumb enough to link to their crappy, little businesses. An amazing number of these are mommybloggers who sell dubious lotions or “green” cleaners or (god help Crabby, it’s true) menopause nightgowns.

The self-importance involved in this kind of spam is stunning. In one recent comment (well, this one was email – there are also too many of those), the mommyblogger told Crabby that she had “reviewed” Crabby’s blog and decided it was “worth” the help she could provide. Crabby’s blog traffic would increase and her search engine ranking would climb, said the woman, if Crabby would just link to her commercial website, and there would be an even bigger benefit if Crabby would write a post about the wonderful product she is “offering” people.

Feeling the need to bitch about all this public, Crabby chose this email to check into rather than just delete it as usual. It took all of 30 seconds to find that the website’s traffic was less than a tenth of Crabby’s and the associated blog had an authority of 0 on Technorati. (Not that those rankings bear any resemblance to reality, but that’s another story.)

Well, really now. What else did Crabby expect.

All spam is evil and Crabby isn’t even talking about the bandwidth used up with millions, maybe billions, of spam messages a day. But to mess up blogs with spam comments is no different than if the person spray painted an ad on your house or car. It craps up the blog and steals time from the blogger for the necessary house cleaning every day.

Most spammers – the smart ones - are anonymous, impossible to track down. For the ones stupid enough to use their real names and provide a link to their blogs or websites, Crabby is thinking there should be a website where they can be outed and listed as blog criminals.

All Crabby Old Lady – or anyone – owns of real value, worth more than diamonds, gold and any amount of wealth, is their time. Spammers are time thieves.

There are mornings when Crabby, weary at seeing the blog and email spam first thing, wants to shut down her laptop and give up. She wonders then how many hours, days, weeks, months are wasted in the collective blogosphere on these miscreants.

[At The Elder Storytelling Place today, JoAnn marvels at how much remains to be said even after nearly 50 years of marriage in Time to Talk.]