Evans Liberal Politics, March 5, 2011, by Paul Evans: I’ll try to make this entertaining for you.

Evans Liberal Politics has been around for 2 1/2 years, and for the last 1 1/2 of that we have been a WordPress blog. With WordPress comes finding “plugins” for added functionality, social networking, Google ratings, keeping track of statistics about numbers of visitors and various details about them — and comments.

Since Evans Liberal Politics has been a WordPress site, I’ve used the Askimet plugin for WordPress to manage my viewers’ comments and to minimize that website owner’s bane, spam comments. What is a "spam comment" you ask, and what could possibly be amusing about them? Well, people comment on a blog to make some kind of a point, to thank the website owner for an article, or just as a kind of social function. That’s why website owners have commenting functionality built into their websites: because people like to do it and it makes blogs a little more popular. But there is another reason that people comment…. Ah, the dreaded “spam comment,” I know it well. So what exactly is a spam comment? Let me explain.

Well, websites need to be popular and to be found by search engines, and hopefully to be found on page one of search results, so that people will come to their websites. Website owners need to be popular to sell items of e-commerce, or for some kind of vanity, or if they are purveyors of information, they want to be found to get their message “out there.” To get high search engine rankings is the main way websites get “found” and generate traffic (meaning a high number of visitors).

The three most popular search engines today are Google, Yahoo, and Bing. To generate traffic, you need to get found on the first page of search engine results for searches about terms relating to your website. (When people search for something, it used to be true, 90 percent of them click on the first search result, with the remaining ten percent spread down page one of the results. Very few people go on to page two of the search results, although website viewers are definitely getting to be more sophisticated these days.) In our case, we need to have “high ranking” for search terms like “liberal politics”, “US liberal politics”, “liberal news source”, “truthful liberal news”, “liberal Christian news”, etc., etc. in the major search engines.

One way to get high rankings is through what is called “SEO” or “search engine optimization,” where you have a lot of links (more properly “hyperlinks” either on your website or on other websites, pointing to your website. Some of this is built into WordPress by default and you can easily get better results with some of the readily available plugins. Another way, of course, is to be famous, which I’m not. Which brings us to spam comments, sorry for the long introduction.

Have you noticed that when you leave a comment you are invited to enter a website address? That link points at a website, and if that website has enough links pointing at it, it will get much higher Google search ratings (and Yahoo search, etc.). For a lot of websites, high traffic means high revenue, and many websites are desperate to generate an audience either to sell goods or whatever. We do just a little of that here, because we have ADS on site, and if a viewer clicks one of those ads, and then buys something, the company that sells the product tracks where the viewer came from (our site), and we make just a little money. Here, even though we have between 10,000 and 20,000 page views a day, the most we have ever made off of the ads in a day is about $6. (People, check out our ads!! Pretty please??)

That’s not why I run the website anyway. The entire message of Evans Liberal Politics is about CARING and building a more caring society and I put all the work I do into our site simply in order to get that message out. No other reason.

But a lot of website owners go around the web to popular websites leaving many hundreds or thousands of “spam comments” on the popular sites, trying to get higher Google search rankings to generate higher numbers of visitors (traffic) to their websites. Traffic means money, to these people. And there is even a lot of bogus software for sale which generates thousands of these spam comments and sends them out all over the web. (“There. Finally he has explained what he is talking about!”)

Since we became a WordPress blog, my Askimet blog commenting software tells me, Askimet has protected this site from approximately 149,400 spam comments. And plenty of them get through anyway, too. I have chosen to review EVERY comment individually and personally, and I DECIDE what is a spam comment and what isn’t. The more I mark comments of various sorts as spam (or not), the better Askimet gets at ferreting out the spam comments and shoving them into the spam comments folder. But I still review them ALL INDIVIDUALLY, and it is very time consuming and frustrating to know that very many of these comments are in NO way legitimate comments, they were just generated and spit out by spam commenting software. It takes up my time and effort, just the same.

Sometimes I don’t even have time to review all the comments, especially when I am hosting a really popular article. Then I will only go through the comments and review those in the “Pending” comments folder and HAVE TO empty ALL of the comments in the “Spam” comments folder – just delete all of them. Normally I like to review those individually, too, because Askimet often gets it wrong and about ten percent of these are legitimate comments. Guess I am just a softy. (Or a glutton for punishment. That would likely be an idea my friend Betsy would agree with!)

All the comments you see are ALL comments I individually approved for posting. Many of them I have made personal replies to. And I AM getting better at telling a spam comment from a legitimate one, so beware you spam commenters! In the first place are the people who are actual visitors but leave comments with links to sites that I am not comfortable with promoting or leaving a link to on my site. This is a Christian website. I have had the nicest, most reasonable comments, but the links point to sex shops or porno, and of course, I don’t allow those comments, so people, there is no point in leaving those sorts of comments. Don’t waste your time and mine.

Then there are the actual spam comments, in all probability generated off site and somehow sent in here via commenting software. When I get somewhat lengthy, identical comments that get repeated by several commenters, I will only allow it the first time through. Doesn’t matter how good or flattering it is, generally I only get fooled once. I have had a whole series of perhaps one hundred or more comments which all appeared very reasonable but were all signed with the people’s name, thus: john Smith (using all sorts of names). And just a few of those with the first name uncapitalized (and last name capitalized) were obvious spam comments, so that gave away that they all were spam if the person signed the comment with the first name uncapitalized. One guy leaves all his comments signed Andrew Sailor and all of those are spam, although it is not always easy to tell. There are very many ways to tell what is a spam comment, but it takes a little practice and a lot of time. The nature of the beast (the details) keep changing, too. And a lot of people send in multiple comments that seem reasonable, but just one of those comments by the person is obviously spam. From then on buddy, you are persona non grata with me. One strike and you’re out! Do you hear that, “Zero Friction Marketing”?

I won’t approve a comment that is labeled “click here,” no matter how reasonable it is, nor any “phone number lookups” (I’ve been getting a lot of those), nor any comment with a link about medications for sale (my own Canada Pharmacy — see ad — is the best and cheapest there is, and entirely legal). Nor will I approve a comment that has any detail and is identical to a comment I have approved before — and I have a great memory! If you are a website design or marketing website, there is not much chance that I will arove your comment. I just have too much experience with marketing and your guys’ spam comments to bother thinking about those much, I just delete them.

This is a news and politics website. You are supposed to make comments ABOUT the article you are commenting on! I’ve been doing this for two-and-a-half years, now. I know all your tricks. You get the idea; I’ve been around the block just a FEW times. Give it up!

Then there is “jonn2,” whom I consider my most consistent, longest running spam commenter. Get this: jonn2 has an avatar that he leaves with his comments, and it is a tiny image of his beautiful face, wrapped in a bunny face outfit, complete with two furry long rabbit ears. Nice touch, don’t you think? Jonn2 leaves huge long spam comments related to various bogus medical products, medications, and prescription and even illegal drugs for purchase. (Cheap, too, I bet!). And there can be up to a hundred or more links in just ONE spam comment from jonn2. I get perhaps three or four of these from him each hour. And jonn2 is branching out. Now he must have some kind of a website about mortgages and refinancing them, because I am getting those spam comments from him, too, now, with dozens of links in them. Jonn2 is a busy man.

Gee, Jonn, don’t know what you see in me. Wish he’d swallow too many of those pills he sells (not really, Jonn, but go away)! Now I halfway expect Jonn to redouble his efforts, even though he has NEVER had one of his comments approved by me. These morons don’t learn though. He may ever only have actually been on our site one time, decided to spam it, and never even checks to see if the comments get though. A guy like him is spamming hundreds if not thousands of sites, I bet. Here’s some advice, people: DON’T include links (except to legitimate news articles) in the body of your comments, because 99.9 percent of the time, I delete those.

Hey world: I wasn’t born yesterday. You are only wasting my valuable time which I could be using in bringing my audience important news, political and social articles which my viewers very well might like to read. PLEASE, don’t waste my time and get a life and send your spam comments elsewhere, O.K? God will judge you, you know (IF you believe in God…. or even if you don’t, he’ll still judge you one day). I may spend up to about two hours a day reviewing these stupid comments, and actually, there have only been about 50 or 100 comments in the entire history of the site that actually commented intelligently and at any length really ABOUT the article’s content. IT’S FRUSTRATING!!!

Sigh. The website owner will now go off and attend to the roughly 100 plus comments he needs to review which have piled up while he has been massaging his ego and writing this rant. I needed to get this off my chest. Thus ends the rant. And yes, feel free to comment LOL.   ~ Paul

As for you spam commenters who flood websites with bogus comments, may your testicles or breasts shrivel up and you become impotent as a wet noodle! There. That feels better.

UPDATE: March 16, 2011: In order to “have a better life” and not spend up to two hours a day digging through the spam comments to see what few of them might be valid, I am now deleting spam comments en masse. I just receive too many comments that end up there, so that 100 might accumulate in an hour. Then you have to go through and try to decide if any are valid comments. I no longer have the time to do this and apologize for a certain amount of real comments which, of necessity, are now going to be deleted.

p.s. Comments for this post are disabled. LOL

See Spamgrish 2: Return of the ambiguous spam comments!, ZDNet, January 25, 2011, by Stephen Chapman.

See Wikipedia’s article on Spam in blogs.

Read the comprehensive Six Apart Guide to Comment Spam.

"A positive attitude may not solve all your problems, but it will annoy enough people to make it worth the effort." — Herm Albright (1876-1944)

IN THE NEWS: See Michael Moore rallies Wis. pro-union protesters, AP on Yahoo News, March 5, 2011, by Associated Press.

See also ‘Libya no-fly zone an option’: Obama gives strongest indication yet U.S. forces may be deployed in Middle East rebellion, Mail Online, March 4, 2011, by Daily Mail Reporter.

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