Ho hum...  another round of spammers have tagged me.  No big deal, it shouldn't affect you...  I simply don't publish anything that isn't worthwhile.

I did think this was kind of interesting though, so let me spill the basic premise to you. 

Just like you can leave comments on my blog entry, other bloggers can as well.  I got a notification that a couple of my recent entries have comments so I checked them out.  Basically they are "pingbacks", which are a somewhat enhanced version of "trackbacks".  A blogger copies the trackback link of one of my blog entries and posts it on their blog.  They enter some non-specific gibberish about how they thought the article was cool and supply the link.  Of course, the rest of their site is loaded with advertising and pop-ups.  The text often looks smthng like this:

I came across this post - General Stuff - and thought it was worth sharing. I hope you find it interesting too and take the time to read some of the other articles on their site.

Their blogging software sends a message to my blogging software telling it that there's a trackback.  My software converts that to a comment, and waits for me to publish it. In a reasonable society, it makes sense that our blogs have smthng in common...  which is why someone would link to me in the first place.  So, why not share?  Well, I (being the good blogger manager that I am), go check the other guys blog to find it's basically junk.  So I nuke the comment and you, dear reader, are none the wiser.  Spammers are foiled again!

You might actually be surprised by how much spam my blog gets.  It's rather ridiculous, especially considering that only a handful of people ever find me.  Anyway...

I know there are some other bloggers (and wanna-be bloggers - as soon as you install some decent software, you know who you are) so I figured I'd pass this along.  If you have a blog, don't automatically accept comments and verify what you're posting.  You've been warned.

BTW... you might be interested to know that "pingbacks" were created to help avoid blog spam.  Now, it just means that your spam will come from another blog instead of a dedicated web page.

Monday, October 15, 2007 12:20 PM