Junk Mail
What’s the difference between spam and junk mail? Not a lot. We have had an increasing flow of e-garbage on LWD since we started blogging in 2006
Invitations to porn sites, and mysterious computer-generated gibberish have now been joined by brief messages which look like part of a sad little marketing effort after someone has been to a ‘how to drive traffic to your site’ seminar.
The sort of thing I mean
This week there has been a whole bunch of such missives from a suspiciously similar set of senders.
Six today [May 8th 2009]:
autotrader
autotraders
auto
autos
car
cars
Each of the six had sent a terse almost English sentence such as
Gotta love yahoo, very neat website. Thanks alot….[sic]
The spam targetted recent and older posts, with utter disregard of post content.
Dumb bloggers
Has there been yet another of those dumb bloggers suggesting this as a brilliant e-marketing idea to build a business?
It is all very sad. It would be nice to find a win-win way to reduce the flow. The openness of open source for encouraging discussion is one of its appealing features for me, and I am still one step away from introducing a barrier to entry to comments for LWD. Creative solutions welcomed. Maybe if you come across any blog advocating such pathetic advice you could send them this post. A legitimate application of viral marketing, I’d argue.
Acknowledgement
To Joan Harvest with grateful thanks for the junk mail free zone image
Click for regular updates
…..then a few hours later another
Car dealer:
‘Really love google, very fine website. Have a nice day….’
What did they used to say about second-hand car salesmen?
Thanks for the link. There’s not a day that goes by that I don’t get blogging junk comments. Some of them seem so real until you investigate a little further.
Hi Tudor
I’m not quite sure what you’re looking for in this post
I’m afraid that there is nothing 😦 that you can do to reduce the amount of spam you receive
however there are “intelligent” wordpress plugins that you can install to automatically manage the spam – example: http://codex.wordpress.org/Combating_Comment_Spam#Akismet_Comment_Spam_Fighter (I use this on any blog that I configure these days)
Is this useful to you?
Tim
PS: Please don’t turn off block communications on LWD – how else could I mither an old professor 🙂
Tim the mitherer. I shoulda guessed.
Nice to hear from you.
I believe the various communications will live on through the newly designated ‘Preserved site’ status by the British Library. Askemet already protects LWD from span (ca 15% of all messages) which still leaves quite a few tunnelling in ..
best wishes